CAMERON HILL 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 October 2023 at Melbourne Recital Centre, Southbank

This project was made possible through support from the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne, and the Australian Government through Creative Australia.

CAMERON HILL
Guest Violinist

Cameron Hill is an Australian violinist who appears as soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player. He studied in Melbourne with Cathryn Bills, William Hennessy and Alice Waten, and in Vienna with Dora Schwarzberg and Boris Kuschnir. He has performed as a concerto soloist with many Australian orchestras, including the MSO, ASO, QSO, TSO, CSO and the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra. Cameron has also had success in major competitions, winning both the 2006 ABC Young Performer of the Year, and the 2005 Dorcas McClean National Violin Competition.

His love of chamber music has seen him perform various works with Pinchas Zukerman and Emmanuel Pahud. He was the founding leader of the Hamer Quartet, appeared as leader of the Flinders Quartet, and has toured Europe with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. During 2014, Cameron appeared as guest Concertmaster of the MSO for several months, and in 2015, toured and performed as guest leader of the Australian String Quartet. He is currently the Associate Concertmaster of the ASO.

BEDŘICH SMETANA 1824-1884

String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, “From My Life” (composed 1876)

I. Allegro vivo appassionato
II. Allegro moderato à la Polka
III. Largo sostenuto
IV. Vivace

Born in Litomyšl, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), we often think of Smetana as inherently Czech in his compositional style, yet he spent most of his upbringing speaking German and even calling himself Friedrich.

Unlike his fellow countryman, Dvořák, Smetana was not interested in integrating folk music into his compositions. Instead, he created his own voice, inherently and authentically Czech and earning him the title of “the father of Czech composition”. Jan Branberger’s 1904 statement on Smetana’s “Czechness” explains how he earned that title:

“When he began to write Czech folk operas, Smetana could not rely on any theory of Czech song, for he did not know its characteristics. He was, however, a great genius, a musician in whose soul slumbered unconscious sources of melody delightfully and faithfully Czech. He had no need to develop his Czechness, and with his first operatic note, he at the same time created a Czech dramatic style. Smetana grew out of his Czech inner self, thereby solving at a stroke all questions of style: he wrote just as his enormous instinct led him.”

Heavily influenced by Liszt and his romantic tone poems, Smetana took the trend towards programmatic music to heart with this quartet, writing his own musical portrait depicting pivotal moments of his life. Until this point, chamber music had been seen as “absolute” (or as Shostakovich would say “pure”) music, so using it as a vehicle for his own life story was a novel idea.

By the summer of 1874, Smetana was completely deaf, suffering greatly from tinnitus, and had retreated to his daughter’s house where he immersed himself in composition. The original manuscript was deemed too difficult to perform in public (a problem often encountered by Beethoven in his later years), and a private performance was held with Dvořák playing the viola.

Smetana wrote to his close friend Josef Srb-Debrnov in 1878:

“The first movement depicts my youthful leanings toward art, the Romantic atmosphere, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define, and also a kind of warning of my future misfortune… The long insistent note in the finale owes its origin to this. It is the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tones which in 1874 announced the beginning of my deafness. I permitted myself this little joke, because it was so disastrous to me.

The second movement, a quasi- polka, brings to mind the joyful days of youth when I composed dance tunes and was known everywhere as a passionate lover of dancing.

The third movement . . . reminds me of the happiness of my first love, the girl who later became my first wife.

The fourth movement describes the discovery that I could treat national elements in music and my joy in following this path until it was checked by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness, the outlook into the sad future, the tiny rays of hope of recovery, but remembering all the promise of my early career, a feeling of painful regret.”