Olympic Arts Chamber Music Festival; Guarneri String Quartet at the Japan America Theater; Part 2

<v Speaker>[music plays] [applause] <v Speaker>The string quartet in A-major Opus 18 number 5 by Beethoven has performed

<v Speaker>by the Guarneri String Quartet. <v Speaker>The players acknowledging the applause of our audience here at the Japan America Theater <v Speaker>in Los Angeles. <v Speaker>Celebrating their 20th anniversary next season, the Guarneri Quartet was formed in 1964 <v Speaker>at Vermont's fabled Marlborough Music Festival. <v Speaker>And besides performing regularly in cities and on college campuses throughout the United <v Speaker>States and Canada, the Guarneri Quartet will this year make its 18th tour of Europe. <v Speaker>Other tours have included Japan, Australia and New Zealand. <v Speaker>Although the A-major quartet is a relatively early and comparatively straightforward <v Speaker>work, we hear in it elements that will dominate the music of Beethoven's late period. <v Speaker>Among them, Beethoven's difficulty with accepting musical limitations, <v Speaker>a characteristic that reaches its climax in one of his most unusual and for some people,

<v Speaker>his most disturbing work the complex and intensely dramatic Grosse Fuge. <v Speaker>Nowhere, is Beethoven's ever-restless soul more clearly exposed than in this problematic <v Speaker>work, where probing beyond known musical boundaries, he literally turned <v Speaker>inside out the traditional form of the fuge. <v Speaker>Although its music is still difficult to grasp, even today, the Grosse Fuge or Great <v Speaker>Fuge is certainly not the musical black sheep that critics might once have had us <v Speaker>believe. Perhaps because it originally served as the finale to Opus 130, <v Speaker>the Grosse Fuge has very close ties with several quartets from that same period. <v Speaker>It opens with an introduction which serves as a highly compressed preview of the entire <v Speaker>work constructed of semitones. <v Speaker>The main subject is presented in a series of fits and halts. <v Speaker>Then follows the wild pounding, almost crude rhythms of the fugues counter <v Speaker>subject. These materials are then developed, varied, splintered,

<v Speaker>apart and abandoned for brief moments of gentle relief during this <v Speaker>constant struggle between dissonance and serenity. <v Speaker>The Guarneri quartet will now perform the Grosse Fuge or Great Fuge in <v Speaker>B-flat, Opus 133 by Beethoven. <v Speaker>[music plays] [applause] <v Speaker>Beethoven's Grosse Fuge in B-class, Opus 133 has performed

<v Speaker>by the Guarneri String Quartet violinists Arnold Steinhardt and <v Speaker>John Dalley, violist Michael Tree and cellist David Soyer. <v Speaker>Recordings by the Guarneri String Quartet, several of which have won international <v Speaker>awards, are exclusively on RCA Red Label. <v Speaker>[applause] <v Speaker>And returning now to the stage of the Japan America Theater in Los Angeles, <v Speaker>the members of the Guarneri String Quartet. <v Speaker>[applause] <v Speaker>We've come to the midpoint in this broadcast concert coming to you from the Japan America

<v Speaker>Theater in Los Angeles. On the second half of this all Beethoven program, the Guarneri <v Speaker>String Quartet will return to perform another work from Beethoven's final years. <v Speaker>The String Quartet in A-Minor Opus 132. <v Speaker>You are listening to a broadcast concert from the Olympic Arts Chamber Music Festival. <v Speaker>A concert featuring the distinguished Guarneri String Quartet. <v Speaker>We invite you to hear four more of these broadcasts in coming weeks when featured artists <v Speaker>will be the Hoggan String Quartet. <v Speaker>The Colorado String Quartet and the Sequoia String Quartet. <v Speaker>Next week, the winners of the 1983 Munich International Music Competition, <v Speaker>the violin and piano duo of Peter Motyka and Tereza Turner Jones. <v Speaker>We pause now for station identification.