Ernest Bloch: The man and his music; Episode 6 of 15

Riverside Radio presents the sixth in a series of 15 programs Ernest Bloch, The Man and His Music. The commentator for these programs is Suzanne Bloch, the composer's daughter and a member of the faculty at the Juilliard School of Music. Today's program will be devoted to a performance of the string quartet number four with the griller quartet and the Concerto Grosso number one. Here to introduce our program is the composer's daughter, Suzanne Bloch. After a very productive year in 1952, when he wrote four important works including string quartet number three, Bloch wrote only one composition in 1953. This was his fourth quartet. It had his premiere by the griller string quartet interpreters closest to Bloch at the time who had worked with him a great deal. All in Downs, who reviewed the work wrote a vivid description of this music. Its principal themes are few.

One which receives many transformations, a theme that Bloch discovered in a book of primitive melodies years ago, which persists in different movements and is varied in ways that are rhythmic as well as linear, harmonically the writing is polygonal, yet the sensation is of a very definite harmonic scheme and the scheme one that is solely and characteristically blocks. The moods are introspective and range from those of a chip of the furious block of old to the mystical communion of his later years. There is indeed a curious combination of the old earthiness and gusto and the later inwardness and serenity that seems to have evolved within this passionate artist with the passing of the decades. Bloch's fourth quartet like his others is in four movements. In the first movement, the thematic material is spare but is heard again in other movements. It starts with a tranquilo followed by an allegro-energical. The slow movement opens the modal theme almost transparent in its simplicity almost naïve.

It has a personality quite different from some of Bloch's other slow movements, less a pastoral than an intermezzo. But it is in the third movement that one hears a primitive tune of which all in Downs writes. It is a theme that Bloch loved ever since he found it. He sang it often to his children, making up some tangy's own words. It is possible that this theme was in a book by the German writer Ernst Grosset, the Unfunger der Kunst, the beginnings of art, of which Bloch had taken copious notes in preparation for lectures and aesthetics in the conservatory of Geneva in 1912. To use a primitive theme as part of Bloch's idiom, generally to give the atmosphere of exotic lands and escape for him. But in this quartet, it comes with no intention to create an atmosphere. It comes at itself, is taken over by each instrument, transformed, brought about in fragments, and returns strongly in the last movement.

It took the theme and made it his own in a truly blocking idiom. The griller quartet, for many years intimately associated with Ernst Bloch and his music, now perform the composer's string quartet number 4. The .

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