Muerte del Angel Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)
Astor Piazzolla was born in Argentina in 1921, but his family moved to New York when he was three years old. He spent his youth in the Italian neighborhoods of New York City, on the lower east side, where he learned to play the bandoneon, the button accordion that is an essential component of a tango orchestra. Piazzolla studied with Hungarian pianist Bela Wilda, a student of Rachmaninoff, and studied composition with Alberto Ginastera. In 1934 he met Carlos Gardel, who invited the young bandoneon player to join him on his current tour. To Piazzolla's dismay, his father decided that he was too young to accompany him. The disappointment turned out to be a blessing, since it was on this tour that Gardel and his entire orchestra perished in a plane crash in 1935.
In 1954 he went to Paris to study with the famous Nadia Boulanger, mentor of many composers (Aaron Copland, Walter Piston and Leonard Bernstein, among others). After working on some less inspired works by Piazzolla, Boulanger asked him what kind of music he really would like to write. He played one of his own tangos for her, prompting her to say that this was the music he should be writing, the music of his heart and not of his head. After a year, he returned to Buenos Aires and dedicated himself to tango. He formed his own ensemble, the Octeto Buenos Aires, to play and record his music, and the rest is history. Originally dance music of the bordellos of Buenos Aires, tango is loved not only as an accompaniment to sensual dance, but also as serious music for the concert hall. Piazzolla, especially in the last years of his career, had great success in blurring the boundaries that traditionally separated "popular" and "classical" music.
String Quartet No. 1, Opus 49 Dimitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)
1. Moderato
2. Moderato
3. Allegro Molto
4. Allegro
The first quartet represents a quite remarkable turn in the works of Shostakovich. In it we find nothing of the pointed dissonance of the previous Shostakovich: the Russian "enfant terrible". Also missing are the passages that take the instruments to their limits, as his music often does. This quartet is full of romance and nostalgia, an idyllic feeling. This brief period of satisfaction after the great success of his Fifth Symphony was mainly due to the fact that Shostakovich was tentatively in political favor with Stalin at that time. Many periods followed when the composer feared he would be sent to a labor camp in Siberia or worse. In view of Shostakovich's life, it is the ease and sense of satisfaction of this string quartet that makes it so remarkable.
Shostakovich was thirty-two years old when he composed his first string quartet, quite late for his first adventure in this genre, considering how prolific he had been in his youth and how many string quartets he would go on to compose in the rest of his life. (15 string quartets). He later wrote: “All year after completing Symphony No. 5, I did nothing. I simply wrote the Quartet, which consists of four small movements. I started writing it without ideas and special feelings. I thought that nothing would come of it. After all, the quartet is one of the most difficult musical genres. I wrote the first page as a kind of exercise in quartet form, without thinking about completing it or publishing it later. But then the work in the quartet captivated me and ended quite quickly. I call it the "Spring Quartet."
String Quartet No. 14 in D minor "The Death and the Maiden" Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828)
1. Allegro
2. Andante con Moto
3. Scherzo, Allegro Molto
4. Presto
One of the truly iconic works in the repertoire of the string quartet, Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" quartet is named after the song whose theme is used in the second movement. Especially in Schubert's time, death was a constant in everyday life. In fact, his own mother had died when he was only 15 years old.
When Schubert returned to a previous song and began work on the string quartet in 1824, death had become even more real to him. At that stage of his life, he had become familiar with painful episodes of syphilis, the disease that he knew would kill him. He turned the song into a set of variations, preceding it with a fierce Allegro, and following it with a Scherzo, and a Finale that has been described as "the dance of the demon violinist, a dance with death." The quartet has been called a large-scale drama of Shakespearean proportions.
