Violinist and conductor Warren Davidson is a founding member of the Academy String Quartet. He joins Jim Cunningham to discuss the new series of concerts staring Friday September 16 at 7:30 at the Sunnyhill Unitarian Church in Mount Lebanon. The concert will repeat the following evening at the Central Presbyterian Church in Tarentum. Warren provided his notes on the program “Our program starts with variations, by ten different Russian composers, on a Russian folk song. Some of those composers are well-known to music lovers (Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin), some you may have stumbled across a few times (Glazunov , Liadov), and others, we quartet members had never heard of (for example, Victor Ewald and Nicolai Sokolov). The ten short variations each have a particular character, an individual flavor. Pittsburghers will understand when I compare this piece to the cookie table at a wedding: “Which one is the tastiest? Guess I have to try them all…” Joseph Haydn, often called the “father of the string quartet,” was a great master of variation technique. Our concert features a relatively early work, Opus 20 #4, and a late quartet, Opus 76 #3, that each include a variations movement. In the case of the Opus 20 quartet the theme is in the style of an operatic air. Though Haydn’s operas are not often heard today, he wrote a lot of them for performance at Esterhazy, the magnificent estate of his princely employer (which had not only an opera theater but a marionette theater, too). It is easy to imagine a character on stage singing this tune, telling to us how they are unlucky in love, and it is hard to know whether we are supposed to take them seriously. The cartoon-like finale movement suggests that perhaps the variation movement should be seen as somewhat tongue-in-cheek. In the Opus 76 quartet, Haydn makes gorgeous variations on a song that he was very proud of: Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser¸ which was adopted as the Austrian national anthem and (later) as the alma mater of the University of Pittsburgh. This later quartet is, taken as a whole, a grand statement, in which these proud and noble musical lines fit perfectly. In between those fabulous Haydn quartets we bring for you a clever piece of silliness: Stylistic Variations on Smoke on the Water, by Kenneth Abeling. The 1972 hit song by the band Deep Purple is transformed into Latin dance music, a gentle waltz, and a swing tune, before the quartet rocks out in the final section.
Violinist and conductor Warren Davidson is a founding member of the Academy String Quartet. He joins Jim Cunningham to discuss the new series of concerts staring Friday September 16 at 7:30 at the Sunnyhill Unitarian Church in Mount Lebanon. The concert will repeat the following evening at the Central Presbyterian Church in Tarentum. Warren provided his notes on the program
“Our program starts with variations, by ten different Russian composers, on a Russian folk song. Some of those composers are well-known to music lovers (Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin), some you may have stumbled across a few times (Glazunov , Liadov), and others, we quartet members had never heard of (for example, Victor Ewald and Nicolai Sokolov). The ten short variations each have a particular character, an individual flavor. Pittsburghers will understand when I compare this piece to the cookie table at a wedding: “Which one is the tastiest? Guess I have to try them all…”
Joseph Haydn, often called the “father of the string quartet,” was a great master of variation technique. Our concert features a relatively early work, Opus 20 #4, and a late quartet, Opus 76 #3, that each include a variations movement. In the case of the Opus 20 quartet the theme is in the style of an operatic air. Though Haydn’s operas are not often heard today, he wrote a lot of them for performance at Esterhazy, the magnificent estate of his princely employer (which had not only an opera theater but a marionette theater, too). It is easy to imagine a character on stage singing this tune, telling to us how they are unlucky in love, and it is hard to know whether we are supposed to take them seriously. The cartoon-like finale movement suggests that perhaps the variation movement should be seen as somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
In the Opus 76 quartet, Haydn makes gorgeous variations on a song that he was very proud of: Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser¸ which was adopted as the Austrian national anthem and (later) as the alma mater of the University of Pittsburgh. This later quartet is, taken as a whole, a grand statement, in which these proud and noble musical lines fit perfectly.
In between those fabulous Haydn quartets we bring for you a clever piece of silliness: Stylistic Variations on Smoke on the Water, by Kenneth Abeling. The 1972 hit song by the band Deep Purple is transformed into Latin dance music, a gentle waltz, and a swing tune, before the quartet rocks out in the final section.