SKU: CA.940105
ISBN M-007-25328-8.
SKU: CA.940100
ISBN M-007-25186-4.
Brahms always had a fine feeling for lyrical quality. His cycle Vier Quartette (Four Quartets) op. 92 for voices and piano, setting four poems by Goethe, Daumer, Allmers, and Hebbel, demonstrates his musical skills in a particularly moving way. The cycle is about the romantic night atmosphere, about melancholy reflections on autumn, and secret noctural amorous adventures. The Urtext edition from Carus comprises a conductor's score in large format and a choral score, both underlaid with singing text in German and English, and the piano accompaniment. The cycle can be performed by solo voices and piano, or by four-part mixed choir and piano.
SKU: HL.49045639
ISBN 9781540004796. UPC: 888680710774. 9.5x12.0x0.37 inches.
Chaconne (2016), for string quartet, was commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet to celebrate its 15th anniversary. The commission was supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and Aaron Copland Fund for Music.My music has a substantial history with Daedalus. I composed the Third String Quartet (2008) for them, and subsequently they performed my three string quartets on several occasions and recorded them brilliantly on Bridge Records (Bridge 9352: Music of Fred Lerdahl, vol. 3). Chaconne is in one movement lasting 19 minutes. It is effectively my fourth string quartet. Quartets 1-3 form a unified cycle lasting 70 minutes. When I finished the cycle, I thought I would never write again for the medium; yet I could not resist the opportunity of working again with Daedalus. The issue was how to compose another string quartet unrelated to the earlier cycle. The solution came from my solo cello piece There and Back Again (2010), which was based on a four-bar variation pattern from a 17th-century chaconne. Unlike the asymmetrical phrases and expanding variations of much of my music, the chaconne form requires symmetrical phrases and strictly periodic variations. I wished to work again with these symmetries but on a larger scale. Chaconne also differs in character and expression from the three-quartet cycle. The cycle is inward and intense, a kind of psychological excavation. Chaconne is, for the most part, transparent and playful. Many of its textures emerge from little canons, not completely unlike the rounds that children sing. Any composer who writes in chaconne form (one thinks above all of the last movement of Bach's D minor violin partita and the finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony) is confronted with the challenge of how to create a larger form out of a constantly repeating pattern.My Chaconne grows from paired antecedent-consequent phrases, each variation lasting eight bars. The 50 variations group into three large rotations, forming three arcs of tension and relaxation, with subtle parallel connections across the rotations. Notwithstanding my attraction to chaconne form, I purposefully disguised its symmetries and periodicities in order to build an overall dramatic shape. Fred Lerdahl.
SKU: BR.CHB-16002
ISBN 9790004413296. 7.5 x 10.5 inches. German.
The Four Quartets op. 92 were composed in 1884 during Brahms' summer's stay in Murzzuschlag (Styria). The opening piece, however, was a revision of an earlier vocal quartet composed in 1877. Brahms had announced this to his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg on 13 November 1877 as a bad joke on music paper with which he was reacting to her reproach regarding an earlier lied (op. 71 No. 4) with an ironic text insertion before the beginning of the reprise. In the revision of 1884, Brahms significantly changed the C-major middle section especially. In the present edition's appendix, the early version of O schone Nacht! is disclosed for rediscovery in comparison with the version published as op. 92 no. 1. The quartets were published on 1 December 1884 by Simrock, one week later, the first public performance of the work took place in the Large Gurzenich Hall in Cologne. The pieces found their primary target audience, however, in private performances as domestic music. Even today, they recommend themselves for smaller choral scorings or ensembles with piano accompaniment. The night-time melancholic text selection with works by Daumer, Hebbel and Goethe seems fit for these.
