MARIA BASILIDES (Soprano)
THE POLTRONIERI STRING QUARTET: ALBERTO POLTRONIERI (Violin); FIORENZO MORA (Violin); GUIDO FERRARI (Viola); ANTONIO VALISI (Violoncello)
THE INTERNATIONAL STRING QUARTET: ANDRE MANGEOT (Violin); BORIS PECKER (Violin); FRANK HOWARD (Viola); HERBERT WITHERS (Violoncello)
THERE are only a few first-rate pieces of music in existence for the team which listeners are to hear in this programme-a double string quartet with 4 violins, 2 violas, and 2 violoncellos. And the performance is being made possible by the union of two string quartets, both of which listeners have already heard playing that happiest of all friendly and intimate music. The Poltronieri Quartet comes from Milan and is one of the most distinguished quartets not merely in Italy, but in present-day Europe; the International Quartet, although making its headquarters in London, has played with conspicuous success in many countries of the world.
POLTRONIERI and INTERNATIONAL STRING QUARTETS
This is an even more youthful work of Mendelssohn's than the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture. It was composed when he was only sixteen. It has all the freshness and vitality which one expects from youth, but it is masterly in its command of the instruments, and in the skill with which the whole team of eight is used. In every way it betrays the hand of one who was already a master of his job; like the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, it is music which any of the great masters might have been glad to claim as a mature work. Mendelssohn evidently had some special affection for it himself; a good many years later than its first composition he rescored the second movement, the Scherzo, for full orchestra, and when he was conducting at one of the Philharmonic Concerts in London in 1829, he had it played in his first Symphony, instead of the Minuet movement.
The Octet is in four movements. The first is bold and vigorous, the second, the slow movement, is in essence a Romance, rich with Mendelssohn's graceful melody; the Scherzo is in something like the same light-hearted measure as the Midsummer Night's Dream music, recalling its fairies, and the last is in fugal form. A theme from the Scherzo reappears in it; Mendelssohn was among the first of the great masters to make use of this device of recalling an earlier movement in the course of a later one.
THE first song is the lament of a maid, coldly deserted by her love. The second is a whimsical little song which asks why a maiden's heart is soft as butter. In the third, the singer prays that the waters might rise and bear him to his father's threshold; and the fourth tells of Winter's going and the coming of Spring.
THE first of the Transylvanian songs is of three sad little orphans and their prayer that the Lord may take them under His care. In each verse of the second one, the singer tells of going to market and buying now a Rooster and now a Turkey, and so on, although he had only one groat to spend. The third is a tale of a heartless wife who danced while her husband was dying, although her daughter called her home. The fourth is a sad song of the Weeping Willow, and the fifth is a merry air, rather like a Nursery Rhyme, about one, Longnose, who comes and eats everything in the larder.Ã
POLTRONIERI and INTERNATIONAL STRING QUARTETS
AT this end of Europe we know very little of Roumanian music; that we know anything of it at all is chiefly due to Georges Enesco. Born in 1881, he studied in Paris and in Vienna, but that insight into the more conventional music of Western Europe has not in any way modified his enthusiasm for the folk songs of his own country. Many of these tunes sound to us very like the Hungarian national music with which such great people as Liszt and Brahms have made us familiar; as in most music of Slav origin, strong bold rhythm is the feature which strikes the listener chiefly.
Enesco's own music, whether or not it is making actual use of folk tunes, is Roumanian in the sense that it embodies something of their spirit, in the very same way in which much of the modern music of ces own country is definitely English.
