Biography

Sara Bitlloch  -  violin             
Donald Grant  -  violin      
Simone van der Giessen  -  viola        
Marie Bitlloch  -  cello

“Few quartets at any stage of their evolution have this much personality,” claimed the Washington Post of the Elias String Quartet. Formed in 1998 at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, the Quartet took its name from Mendelssohn’s oratorio, Elijah (Elias in German), and quickly established itself as one of the leading lights of the younger generation of string quartets. In 2009, it was a recipient of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. With the support of the Trust, the Elias String Quartet mounted The Beethoven Project, studying and performing all of Beethoven’s string quartets as cycles while sharing their experience through social media and a website (www.thebeethovenproject.com). The project culminated with a cycle at Wigmore Hall, where all six concerts were recorded live for the hall’s own label. The final volume of the Elias String Quartet’s complete Beethoven cycle was recently released. The ensemble’s discography also includes quartets by Mendelssohn and Schumann, as well as piano quintets by Schumann and Dvořák with Jonathan Biss. Return LMMC engagement.

https://eliasstringquartet.com/

Notes

King Frederick Wilhelm II of Prussia was not only a regent; he was also the dedicatee of major compositions by Mozart (his last three string quartets), Beethoven (his first two cello sonatas), and Haydn (the six “Prussian” Quartets of 1787, Op. 50). Why all this munificence? Because Wilhelm was himself an accomplished musician – a cellist who loved to play chamber music. Goethe once described a string quartet as a conversation among four sensible people. In this way of thinking, Haydn must be declared a superb conversationalist in his manipulation of motivic ideas, imitative writing, canonic entries and fugal passages – all qualities easily observed in the quartet we hear this afternoon.

Stravinsky wrote the modest little pieces entitled simply Three Pieces for String Quartet in Salvan, Switzerland, in 1914, one year after the epochal, explosive Rite of Spring. No two works could be more different. When the Three Pieces were first published, in 1922, they had no titles, only metronome markings. Stravinsky added the titles years later for the first performance of the orchestrated version in 1930, to which he added one more piece to make the Four Etudes for Orchestra. The first (“Dance”) consists of a repeated four-note motif for the first violin, its limited range suggestive of a Russian chant or folk melody. “Eccentric” was inspired by the jerky movements and postures of a clown Stravinsky had seen performing in a circus in London. “Canticle” is, in Stravinsky’s terms, “choral and religious in character.”

Beethoven did not affix the subtitle  “Harp” to the tenth of his sixteen string quartets; this was done sometime later by an unknown hand. The conspicuous use of pizzicato (plucked) notes on several occasions in the first movement may well suggest the harp to some ears. Shortly after the Allegro section  begins, the “harp” effect is heard briefly for the first time, used here as a transition passage to the second subject. Probably the most memorable of the harp effects is the passage leading into the recapitulation, where three of the four instruments play first duplets, then triplets, then quadruplets - all pizzicato - and finally sextuplets (now too fast to be played pizzicato), which almost imperceptibly returns to bowed notes.

Robert Markow