Three Ships, Harvest Time and Droplets
With the first of our Christmas String Quartet Concerts fast approaching, we wanted to devote some of yesterdays rehearsal time to playing through the first of the completed Christmas carol arrangements which we’ll be performing. The first concert will be on the 11th of December in St Giles Church, Cheddington and the second will see us returning to St Michael’s at the North Gate in Oxford on the 18th of December, when hopefully everyone will be getting into a festive mood.
The seven carol arrangements which I have completed so far are all very traditional and firm favourites, including ‘I Saw Three Ships’ which we decided to film during the rehearsal.
After lunch we got going again on some more ‘miniatures’ from the Merton collection in the hope of finding some neglected gems worthy of recording. After last week, we could not resist starting again with the Variations on an Original Theme by Francis Purcell Warren (see last weeks blog!) - although we all really like the piece, we felt that it wouldn’t necessarily compliment the rest of the material planned for the disc, but do hope to include it in a concert programme as soon as possible!
In complete contrast, Tony next selected a piece called ‘Pour le temps de la Moisson’ (Harvest Time) by Etienne Royer. Royer (1880-1928) was a French composer and as far as we know, this is his only string quartet in three movements - largely based on motifs derived from French folksong. Our first impressions were of a piece sprinkled with beautiful moments and some wonderful textures, but after exploring the first movement for over 10 minutes we found that the wandering nature of the work didn’t seem to lead in any clear direction and the sum of its’ parts didn’t translate into a convincing whole. Nevertheless, there is definitely music worth exploring in greater depth here.
Changing countries, we next opted for a piece by Theodore Furchtegott Kirchner (1823-1903) - a German organist and composer who was a close friend to both Schumann and Mendelssohn. Kirchner actually wrote over 1000 works for piano and his few string chamber pieces were noted for their craftsmanship. The piece is called ‘Nur Tropfen’ which Tony assured us means ‘Only Droplets’. It is a series of 7 miniatures - and despite being an understated piece, each individual movement is often no more than 3 or 4 lines long. Each section had an uncanny knack of doing what the Royer piece seemed incapable of doing on a larger scale - namely the individual movements were satisfying as a whole despite their brief nature. Each had a different character and seemed to do something musically unusual although they deserve a second outing to be fully understood.
Thirdly we tried a piece by American / Irish composer Swan - Hennessy (1866-1929) who studied in Stuttgart and eventually settled in France. The title of his opus 65 is ‘Serenade’ and is a pleasing little ditty that would make good background music but is not particularly memorable - we swiftly moved on.
Time really began to run out so we decided to end with something we had attempted to play through in the past but which had defeated our sight reading capabilities! This was the Intermezzo for String Quartet by the Austrian composer Hugo Wolf (1860 - 1903). A songwriter of genius, Wolf was a fervent supporter of Wagner and Bruckner and led a turbulent life which ended in an asylum due to his infection with Syphilis. This Intermezzo is an exceptional piece of music which - like his Italian Serenade, possesses huge contrasts of light and shade with sunny skies suddenly blackened by dark storm clouds. As such, it is a remarkable psychological portrait of the composers state of mind in full flow. It is technically demanding but Wolf’s exploration of obscure keys leads to many double flats and enharmonic writing which is difficult to read at speed. This is a piece that we are all eager to play through properly and it would be nice to find time to do this justice.
Overall, another rewarding day - perhaps our last informal rehearsal before Christmas, although we’ll be working hard on the concert material on the mornings of each performance.
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