Brentano quartet and cellist Kannen
play Schubert, Gesualdo, and Frank

The Brentano String Quartet hit the road running. Within a year of its inception in 1992, the ensemble had earned three major awards. When the quartet performs at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in Schwab Auditorium, the program includes a quintet by Franz Schubert, madrigals from Italy, and a commissioned work inspired by Don Quixote.

“Their music making is private, delicate, and fresh,” a critic for The New York Times writes about Brentano, “but by its very intimacy and importance it seizes attention.” A London Independent reviewer calls the quartet’s playing “passionate, uninhibited, and spellbinding.”

The program features Quijotadas, a new Gabriela Lena Frank composition created expressly for Brentano and co-commissioned by the Center for the Performing Arts through its membership in the Music Accord national presenter consortium. Cellist Michael Kannen, a former member of Brentano, joins the quartet to perform two of Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo’s late-Renaissance madrigals arranged for quintet and Schubert’s Quintet for Strings in C Major, Op. 163 (D. 956).

The quartet—violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory, and cellist Nina Maria Lee—is the resident ensemble at Princeton University. The ensemble takes its name from Antonie Brentano, the woman believed by many to be Beethoven’s mysterious “Immortal Beloved.”

The quartet has toured throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan and performed in the most prestigious venues, including Carnegie and Alice Tully halls in New York City; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the Konzerthaus in Vienna; Suntory Hall in Tokyo; and the Sydney Opera House.

In addition to performing works from two centuries worth of standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano musicians have a keen interest in older and newer music. The ensemble has performed works by Gesualdo, Purcell, and Josquin that pre-date the string quartet as a medium. The players have also worked with some of today’s leading composers.

The ensemble celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2002 by commissioning ten composers to create companion pieces to selections from J. S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue. The group has also commissioned poetry by Mark Strand to accompany works by Haydn and Webern.

The quartet has collaborated with artists including soprano Jessye Norman and pianist Richard Goode. The ensemble also has a close relationship with pianist Mitsuko Uchida, with whom it has performed in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The quartet’s recordings include works by Haydn, Mozart, Steven Mackey, Bruce Adolphe, Chou Wen-chung, and Charles Wuorinen.

Kannen was a founding member of Brentano who performed as part of the quartet for seven years. During his time with Brentano, the quartet earned the first Cleveland Quartet Award, the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, and the Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center.

In addition to his work with Brentano, Kannen was a member of the Meliora String Quartet and the Figaro Trio. Today, he is part of the Apollo Trio. He has played with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Berkshire Bach Society. He has also performed at major music festivals across America.

Kannen performs regularly with flutist Paula Robison and harpsichordist Kenneth Cooper. He often performs on period instruments, and recently recorded music by Robert Schumann on ancient instruments with the chamber group Context.

The cellist is the director of chamber music at The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he holds the Sidney Friedberg Chair in Chamber Music.

Composer and pianist Frank was born in Berkeley, California, in 1972, to parents of Peruvian, Jewish, and Chinese heritage. She is known for incorporating Latino/Latin American folk music, mythology, and poetry into Western classical forms. One of the leading American composers of her generation, Frank has created music that is “bursting with fresh originality” (Los Angeles Times) and “brilliantly effective” (The New York Times). 

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote inspired Frank’s Quijotadas for string quartet. “Widely considered the birth of the modern novel, this tale satirizes post-Conquest Spain by relating the story of a middle-aged lesser nobleman who undertakes absurd adventures in pursuit of romantic—and seriously outdated—knightly ideals,” Frank observes. “Cervantes’ brilliant and colorful social commentary still reverberates for us today.”

Quijotadas, Spanish for extravagant delusions in the quixotic spirit, includes five movements.

Meanwhile, Gesualdo (156?–1613), an Italian composer, lutenist, and nobleman, is famous for his intensely expressive madrigals, which employed a chromatic language not used again until the nineteenth century. He’s also infamous for being a murderer.

Born in the principality of Venosa, Gesualdo was part of an aristocratic family. Carlo Borromeo, his uncle, became Saint Charles Borromeo. His mother, Girolama, was the niece of Pope Pius IV.

Gesualdo married Donna Maria d’Avalos, his first cousin, in 1586. A couple years later she began an affair with Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria. She apparently managed to keep the adultery secret from her husband for two years. But on October 16, 1590, at the Palazzo San Severo in Naples, Gesualdo caught the two lovers in the act and murdered them in their bed. He then displayed their mutilated bodies in front of the palace. Since he was a nobleman, Gesualdo was immune to prosecution. But he fled to his castle at Gesualdo and employed bodyguards just in case the relatives of his victims might be intent on revenge.

Several years after the murders, Gesualdo went to Ferrara, a center of progressive music in Italy, and spent two years learning about madrigals. While there, he published his first book of madrigals and took another wife, Leonora d’Este, the niece of Duke Alfonso II.

Gesualdo’s compositions reinforce the belief that he was tortured by guilt for the remainder of his life. The lyrics of his madrigals brim with extremes of emotion.

“Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, wrote some of the most startling, gripping, fiercely expressive music the world has ever known,” asserts Brentano violinist Steinberg, who arranged the two madrigals on the Penn State program. “His biography has lured many into curiosity about his music…, and there have been many discussions of his psychological profile. But in the end, the strength and unflinching audacity of his music alone is more than enough to draw us to him.”

Steinberg compares the madrigals to the aims of a school of European art popular from about 1520 to 1600. “Gesualdo partakes of the aesthetic of the Mannerists, exaggerating color, proportion, and gesture to reveal emotional truths. Think, for example, of the strained, elongated figures of El Greco.”

Brentano performs, in an instrumental setting, two madrigals—“Io parto, e non più dissi” and “Io pur respiro in cosí  gran dolore”—from the last of Gesualdo’s six collections. The works in Book VI, published in 1611, are the composer’s most chaotic.

“The amount of emotional turmoil we can precariously contain within our lives is on occasion fantastically large,” Steinberg writes. “At times we feel we just barely manage to cheat the forces of collapse. This is the volatile world of heightened experience these madrigals evoke, repeatedly holding us in the grip of the concentrated moment.”

Schubert (1797–1828) composed his String Quintet in C Major in the summer of 1828, just a few months before the end of his short life. The work, which was the only string quintet in his vast collection of compositions, wasn’t performed until 1850.

While nineteenth-century critics argued the quintet lacked polish, modern consensus leans toward the view that it is a sublime and transcendentally beautiful major work of the chamber repertoire.

The composer’s unconventional instrumentation—using two cellos instead of the usual two violas—makes the work stand out. Schubert, like Boccherini before him, chose to forego the second viola in favor of an additional cello in order to enhance the quintet’s lower register.

“More than almost any other composer, Schubert expressed the duality of beauty, its innocence and its terror, its embrace and its rebuff,” Steinberg notes. “With exquisite sensitivity he shows us gleaming visions and the pain of their unreachable distance; his all too human longing for the Eden beyond our grasp speaks to the exile in each of us. Schubert is the quintessential exile, feeling alienated from the comforts of society, excruciatingly aware of the ambiguities of nature and fate, both seductive and cruel.”   

Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring one or more visiting artists, is offered in Schwab Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.