HERBERT HEYNER (Baritone)
THE KUTCHER STRING QUARTET :
SAMUEL KUTCHER (Violin); FREDERICK GRINKE (Violin); RAYMOND JEREMY (Viola);
DOUGLAS CAMERON (Violoncello)
SCHUMANN worked in a manner which is rare among the great composers. He appeared to find it necessary to exhaust his ideas completely in one form before he felt the urge to essay another. Thus. in 1840 he spent the whole year in writing nothing but songs; during the next year he composed practically nothing hut large symphonic works for orchestra; and in the year following he changed his medium again and spent much of his time on chamber music. His opus 41 consists of three string quartets, of which the middle one is being played tonight. All three were composed in practically a month, and occasionally during that period he put on paper a whole movement in one day. And it speaks volumes for his fertility, invention, and resource at this time for lie had had scarcely any experience of quartet writing, the one example he is known to have attempted some years before never being seen again after he had completed it. The three quartets were dedicated to Mendelssohn, who was then at Leipzig, and they soon became popular with Leipzig musicians. Indeed, these quartets, and other chamber music which Schumann composed in that year, rapidly caused him to become one of the most talked about of the younger composers. Berlioz, on a visit to Leipzig, was so impressed with a quintet he heard played there that he took back to Paris with him news of the fame of this rising young man. HERBERT HEYNER
Songs
TN most of Dvorak's music, and particularly in -*- his chamber music, decided Slavonic influences—and even more marked local Czech influences-can be consistently traced. It was from the work of Smetana, who was already musically the national hero of Bohemia while Dvorak was still a young man, that he drew his resolve to follow in the great leader's footsteps and tap the national and racial resources in finding material with which to build his compositions. Later, he absorbed all he could learn from the music of Wagner and Liszt, and to these double influences much of the beauty of melodic line, richness of orchestration, and elegance of construction of his works are due. Dvorak was happy, in. the chamber music form, of which a large part of his entire work is composed. His first quartet, marked opus 1, but never published, was written when he was twenty. his last is dated 34 years later.