A Springtime Lark with the Calidore Quartet

The Calidore Quartet - Lookin' Cool on the Streets of the Big City

Who: the Calidore Quartet
What: Haydn, Beethoven, and Shostakovich
When: Saturday, April 28th, 8pm
Where: Market Square Church, downtown Harrisburg
Tickets: $35, $30 seniors (65+); $5 college students, free admission for K-12 age students with $10 ticket for one accompanying adult.

It is officially springtime and while we hope by this weekend we'll be done with the snow (already!), May Flowers cannot be far behind all these April Showers... yes? And so, for those of us enjoying the springtime songs of birds in our back yards – I have a wren serenading my bedroom window (unfortunately at 5am) – we open this last program of Market Square Concerts' current subscription season with one of Haydn's most famous string quartets, nicknamed “The Lark.”

While I couldn't find a video of the Calidore playing Haydn's “Lark,” another bird will have to do: here they are playing the last movement of an earlier Haydn quartet, more generically nicknamed, simply, “The Bird.” It's the 3rd of the set of Op.33 quartets that so inspired Mozart he wrote six quartets which he then subsequently dedicated to Haydn.
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Shostakovich's 9th String Quartet, written in May of 1964, may not be so spring-like. Just as there had been various personal and political crises during the 1930s and '40s that affected his creativity, now, as the composer was in his late-50s, there were new issues to confront – but more of that, later.

To conclude, arguably one of the greatest – and most popular – of the Beethoven Quartets, the third of three string quartets dedicated to the Russian ambassador to Vienna, Count Razumovsky.

This post is about the Haydn and Beethoven Quartets.You can read the post about the Shostakovich quartet on the program, here.

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When music ensembles like a string quartet get together and look for a name to call themselves, the easy way out is simply to name themselves after the first violinist or their location. More challenging is to come up with a musical term that sounds... well, catchy would be good but I'll settle for “not silly.” Others prefer to honor a favorite author or painter – the Emerson comes to mind; the Escher was just in Harrisburg this past February – or even a violin-maker like the Guarneri Quartet. The Cypress Quartet took their name not from the tree, initially, but from a set of works called Cypresses for string quartet by Antonin Dvořák that was part of their core repertoire when starting out. There's even a Lark Quartet which, presumably, takes its name from Haydn's “Lark” Quartet.

Formed as recently as 2010, the Calidore Quartet explains their name this way: Using an amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its home of origin, Los Angeles, California, the “golden state.” (Points, here, for uniqueness.)

Looking over the roster of string quartets crisscrossing the world performing gems of the chamber music repertoire and, occasionally – but more frequently, now – adding new works for the future, you might wonder “where are all those young quartets coming from?” Depending on your tone of voice, you might wonder “what's happened to all those great quartets I used to hear?” We forget that, at some point, the Guarneri and Cleveland Quartets were “young quartets” and who knows who the next generation's Juilliard and Emerson Quartets will be?

In the historical line of things, remember all those winners of the Cleveland Quartet Prize we get to present to you? This is a prize founded by the Cleveland Quartet to foster excellence in the wide-open and highly competitive field of new quartets. And the Emerson Quartet mentors young quartets itself – like the Calidore.

So it was pleasant news, coinciding with our March concert last month, when the Avery Fisher Prize announced its 2018 “Avery Fisher Career Grant” went to... the Calidore Quartet.

While they made their Lincoln Center debut at Alice Tully Hall earlier this month, April has already seen them traveling from Mainz, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain, to St. Louis and Seattle before arriving in Harrisburg.

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So, let's begin with Haydn's “Lark” Quartet, the Quartet in D Major, Op.64/5, performed here by the Jerusalem Quartet.
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In the 18th Century, composers were expected to be like craftsmen, turning out works for their patrons' entertainments, private performances for specific occasions, perhaps, but all before the days of public concerts much less commercial recordings. So, Haydn's prince wanted a new symphony for the visit of a good friend to his summer estate or maybe a string quartet for a special dinner and Haydn would oblige, preparing the musicians for the performance and often being a performer himself. (In those days, musicians were not only on the aristocrat's payrolls, they wore livery like any servant, and ate their dinners with the servants “downstairs” after their “upstairs duties” had been discharged.)

Composers were expected to “produce” as an apple tree produces fruit – quartets by the handful, usually six to a set, just as, in the earlier years of the century, Vivaldi or Corelli would publish their concertos or sonatas by the dozen. They might then be subsequently gathered into these collections and published. In this way, a good court composer like Haydn might become well known beyond the estates of his employer.

Later in the century, following the cultural challenges of the French Revolution and the rise of the Middle Class, these might be offered to a particular patron or marketed with a “subscription” to wealthy music-lovers.

While working on what became the Op.64 set of six quartets in 1790, Haydn was, essentially, eased into retirement, granted a pension and given the opportunity to travel around Europe to enjoy his international fame, rather than remain stuck at the prince's estate living out his Golden Years in further isolation. Like his last dozen symphonies (produced as two sets of six each), Haydn also wrote his last string quartets for the London audiences in the 1790s.

One such “wealthy music-lover” was the Viennese cloth merchant, Johann Tost, considered “newly rich” by Imperial traditions rather than born of the aristocratic “old money” – he had been a musician in his former life, in fact a violinist at Prince Esterhazy's who'd worked with Haydn. So Haydn dedicated his Op. 64 set of new quartets to Tost, largely out of genuine gratitude for Tost (and his new-found wealth and influence)'s help in finding a publisher to help him navigate these new and challenging waters.

(In a future side-light, it's interesting to note that Herr Tost commissioned some new chamber music for his social events from Ludwig Spohr, a young German violinist and composer. Since Tost offered to pay him “by the instrument” as a cloth merchant might sell fabric “by the yard,” Spohr set about writing Tost, to begin, an octet and a nonet.)

A Lark

The nickname "The Lark" is not Haydn's, presumably, and like many “titles” associated with Haydn's works, was probably short-hand so the Prince didn't have to say which quartet he'd want to hear that evening (“you know, the one that starts off like...”) by humming a few bars. And at the time, it hadn't been published, so he could hardly say “you know, the D Major, Op.64 No. 5.” So since the violin's melody in the opening reminded someone of a bird-like song soaring over the accompaniment, it became “The Lark.” Listening to this video of a “skylark” or “song lark,” the similarity between the two is not especially obvious.


Whether Haydn may have had Shakespeare's Sonnet #29 in mind – “the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate" – is also doubtful, but a beautiful image.

The Lark was, for that matter, as likely to appear on the menu back in the day: while considered a delicacy when eaten whole (with bones intact), they were more often broiled or made into a meat pie. I hate to think how many birds it took to make a decent dish of “larks' tongues” – no thanks, I'll pass...

Curiously, in England, where people apparently thought the last movement of this quartet was just as memorable,  it is often called "The Hornpipe" Quartet, given the nature of the final dance. That works, too.

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Considering the Haydn was written in 1790 and Beethoven's three Razumovsky quartets were composed in 1806, it's interesting to listen to these two works and think “they were written only 16 years apart!” In fact, Haydn was still alive when Beethoven composed these comparatively revolutionary – certainly “modern” for the time – quartets.

Here's the Jasper Quartet – who've performed on our series in previous years including this past January – with Beethoven's Quartet in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3, a live recording from the studios of New York City's WQXR:


I've written about Beethoven and his Razumovsky Quartets in the past: in this post, you can read about the quartet itself as well as find the answer to that age-old question, “just what is a Razumovsky, anyway?”

I've written about the Shostakovich quartet in the next post which you can read, here.

- Dick Strawser