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NATSUKO YOSHIMOTO guest violin
WILMA SMITH violin
HELEN IRELAND viola
ZOE KNIGHTON cello

AGATHA YIM, POLYPHONIC PICTURES filming and editing

THOMAS GRUBB, MANO MUSICA sound engineering, editing and mastering

Filmed July 2023 at Melbourne Recital Centre, Southbank

This project was made possible through support from the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and the Australia Council for the Arts.

NATSUKO YOSHIMOTO
Guest Violinist

Born in Japan, Natsuko Yoshimoto began playing the violin at the age of three. She has studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Royal Northern College of Music in England and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She has won awards in international competitions including the Gold Medal in both the prestigious 1994 Shell/London Symphony Orchestra Competition and the Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa Award and the Iwaki Award for outstanding achievement as a Japanese artist.

Natsuko is currently co-Concertmaster of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and is also a member of highly acclaimed chamber group, Ensemble Q. She has been the leader of both the Australian String Quartet and the Grainger Quartet as well as the Concertmaster of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Natsuko regularly appears in major chamber music festivals and is a teacher at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music. She has given many world premieres of works by Australia’s most prominent composers and has recorded for Virgin Classics, ABC Classics, Melba Records and Tall Poppies. In her little spare time, she loves to do pottery!

BEETHOVEN/MACONCHY

ELIZABETH MACONCHY 1907-1994

String Quartet No. 5 (composed 1948)

I. Molto lento - Allegro molto
II. Presto
III. Lento espressivo
IV. Allegro

Elizabeth Maconchy (known affectionately as Betty) was born in 1907 and is considered one of Great Britain and Ireland’s greatest composers of the twentieth century. Growing up in a family that was not focussed on the arts in any way, it is extraordinary that she declared her intention to become a composer in her mid-teens, even before hearing a symphony orchestra for the first time. After being accepted into the Royal College of Music, she studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams who was incredibly supportive; but the head of the school refused to award her the prestigious Mendelssohn scholarship saying, according to the Times of London, "If we give you the scholarship you will only get married and never write another note." She went on to have children and write many more notes, and her daughter, Nicola LeFanu, is a very successful composer herself.

Maconchy owes a great deal of her unique musical voice to her period of study in Prague, where Vaughan Williams advised her to extend her musical knowledge rather than delve into the twelve-tone system of composition sweeping Austria and other parts of Europe at the time. She was introduced to Bartok and Berg, and it is this influence that we hear in her thirteen string quartets.

Each of the thirteen quartets is accessible, containing more than compositional cleverness and intellect. Indeed, one only needs to scrape the surface of her body of work to realise she explores the whole range of the human experience: from her beautifully crafted and very cheeky opera “The Sofa”, to her ballets and symphonic works.

Maconchy’s thirteen quartets were written over a span of fifty years, with the first composed in 1932 and the thirteenth completed in 1984 as the set piece for the 1985 Portsmouth International String Quartet Competition (in which our very own Wilma Smith competed, placing third with her then quartet, the Lydian Quartet).

Maconchy’s fifth quartet won the Edwin Evans Memorial prize of £25 in 1948, and in 1955, a program on the BBC was dedicated to her six quartets to date, testament to their cultural importance of the time. Accolades continued throughout her lifetime with her being joint recipient of the Radcliffe Music Award in 1969 for her ninth string quartet; one of the other recipients was Peter Sculthorpe for one of his string quartets. Endorsed as a composer of the highest stature with prizes, commissions and numerous performances, her career was certainly successful and yet she was still financially dependent on her husband. She did not work as a performer or teacher, instead choosing to focus solely on her compositional output.

Premiered by the Hurwitz Quartet in 1949, the fifth string quartet begins with an interval of a semi-tone as the starting point of a long lyrical line in the cello, and it is this interval that is exploited throughout the entire piece. You will hear each instrument play the opening theme in turn, with a second theme introduced as a counter melody before the tempo is changed abruptly to Allegro molto and a rollicking dance featuring an interplay between 3/4 and 6/8. After the viola brings us back to the Lento material, we are immediately back in Allegro molto mode and if you listen closely, you will hear the opening theme restated in the faster tempo, again in a canon. The movement ends in a satisfying C major.

The second movement is a playful scherzando, stepping up by a semitone to C# from the previous C major. There are so many ways of exploring the interval of a semitone but perhaps one of the most inventive is the opening of the third movement. By having all the instruments fall by a major seventh (the inverse interval of a semitone) it gives the illusion of an expansive breadth, rather than a simple shift between G flat major and G major. It is in this movement that we hear Maconchy’s obvious affinity with vocal music, having the instruments play in a parlando (speaking) style, conversing with great interest with one another. The sinister insistence of the cello pizzicatos in the middle of this movement do remind us of the intensity of WWII, ever fresh in her mind.

These words by Maconchy are very apt in describing the final movement: “I use a counterpoint of rhythms as well as melodic lines – so you may have two or more independent rhythms working together simultaneously. And the object of all this is to achieve a more concentrated expression of the emotion implicit in the musical ideas themselves.” You will hear incredible interplay alongside a delightfully playful pizzicato section with canons that are so fast they’re easy to miss, but the overall effect is a whirlwind rich with counterpoint before we are brought very firmly back to C major.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 1770-1827

String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59, No. 1 (composed 1806)

I. Allegro
II. Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando
III. Adagio molto e mesto
IV. "Thème Russe": Allegro

There are many connections between Maconchy’s fifth quartet and Beethoven’s seventh. Both written on the heels of war and upheaval at times when the creation of music can make sense of the chaos; not to mention the similarities between the two composers forging their own paths and uncompromising in their artistic ideals. Both were fascinated with how much can be developed from a small idea, both have an innate sense of structure, and both began their works on the dominant (fifth scale degree) of the home key. The last point may be coincidence rather than design, but it does well in the connection of these two works.

Written in 1806, at the age of 36 in a year that his brother married and his infamous nephew was born, as well as a year that Napoleon was wreaking havoc in Europe, the three Razumovsky Quartets (Beethoven’s Op. 59 set) were met with a great deal of irritation. Czerny, one of Beethoven’s most famous pupils, told of how at the first play through, the players simply laughed and thought Beethoven was making a huge joke on them. When the Italian musician, Felix Radicati (to whom Beethoven sent the manuscript for fingerings) asked Beethoven if he actually considered these works to be music, Beethoven gave the now infamous reply, “Oh, they are not for you but for a later age.”

A Haydn enthusiast, Razumovsky played second violin in various quartets. The Count seems to have been a real forward-thinking man, and these works did not frighten or disappoint him. He knew Beethoven was a genius and asked for lessons to understand quartet composition. Beethoven refused. Perhaps genius defies explanation.

This quartet, the first in the set of three, is the most monumental and is often likened to Beethoven’s third symphony, ‘Eroica’, in scale. The first movement is in clear sonata form, we hear two gorgeous melodies (first introduced by the cello) rollick along, develop and return. Rather than repeat the exposition, Beethoven gives a false repeat: you will be expecting the opening tune, but at the last minute, Beethoven turns a corner and whisks us away straight to the development. The inner motor in this movement gives a delightful energy and a positivity. The second movement begins with the cello in a snare drum type motif calling the rest of the quartet to dance. Apparently, the celebrated cellist Bernard Romberg stomped his foot on the manuscript in disgust because his “tune” only had one note! How dare he be given a tune you could simply tap out on a pencil - a cellist of his stature! Incidentally, Romberg declined the offer of a concerto from Beethoven stating that he preferred to play his own compositions.

The slow movement - mesto (“mournful”) in its label Adagio molto e mesto- is the longest and most complex slow movement that Beethoven had written since the slow movement of the ‘Eroica’. After a violin cadenza which links the third and fourth movements, the cellist embarks on the ‘Russian Theme’. In its ‘Russian’ version, this theme is in a minor key, is marked Molto Andante, and is a soldier’s lament on his return from the wars. In the exuberant finale, Beethoven turns the theme on its head, placing it in a major key and with a great sense of joy so as to hardly resemble the original.