NYP String Quartet & McDermott
Anne-Marie McDermott, pianoOn closing night of the Chamber Music Series, long-time collaborators, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott and the New York Philharmonic String Quartet open with Mendelssohn's String Quartet in D major, Op. 44, No. 1. and highlight the evening performing the quintessentially American piano quintet by Amy Beach.
Featured Artist
Anne-Marie McDermott
New York Philharmonic String Quartet
Anne-Marie McDermott
piano
One of the most dazzling American pianists of her generation, Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals, and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. She is one of the most versatile, respected, and best-reviewed pianists of our time. McDermott continues her tenure as artistic director of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, in Colorado, through 2026, which hosts world-renowned artists and orchestras from around the world. She is also the artistic director of the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival, in Florida.
Highlights of McDermott’s 2024-25 season include three performances of the Piano Concerto by the 20th-century American composer Amy Cheney Beach with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, with which she makes her subscription debut, and with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra (MA); her debut in Galway, Ireland, performing music by Bach, Busoni, and Brahms at a Music for Galway recital; Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Paducah Symphony Orchestra (KY); Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Des Moines Symphony, Palm Beach Symphony, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra USA (WA); performances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall in New York City, and on tour in Chicago, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Ashland (OR), and Vienna (VA); a special chamber music program at the New World Symphony, in Miami Beach, that includes Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat major and Olivier Messiaen’s wartime masterwork Quartet for the End of Time; performances as a member of the SPA Trio—with soprano Susanna Phillips and violist Paul Neubauer—at the Rockefeller University (New York City), and at Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (Tucson); and a chamber music program at the McKnight Center for the Performing Arts, in Stillwater (OK).
McDermott’s 2023-24 season included performances with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, both resulting in immediate re-engagements. She also performed Mozart with the New York Philharmonic at the McKnight Center in Stillwater. Recent international highlights include recitals in France at the famed Piano aux Jacobins, in Toulouse; performances with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra at the Cartagena International Music Festival; and an all-Haydn recital tour of China.
The breadth of McDermott’s repertoire ranges from Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Scriabin, also including works by today’s most influential composers. A recording artist, McDermott is currently recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mexico City’s illustrious Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería, under conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. She has also recorded the complete piano sonatas of Prokofiev, solo works by Chopin, Bach’s English Suites and Partitas (Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine), and Gershwin’s complete works for piano and orchestra with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (also Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine). In 2013 she released an album of Mozart concertos with the Calder Quartet that was praised as “exceptional on every count” by Gramophone Magazine. She has recorded five Haydn piano sonatas and two Haydn concertos with the Odense Philharmonic, in Denmark, including two cadenzas written by the late American composer Charles Wuorinen.
In recent years, McDermott participated in the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s Silver Jubilee all-Gershwin program and embarked on a cycle of Beethoven concertos at Santa Fe Pro Musica. She also premiered and recorded a new concerto by the Danish composer Poul Ruders with the Vancouver Symphony, alongside Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations, and returned to play Gershwin with the New York Philharmonic at Bravo! Vail. Other recent highlights include performing the Mozart Concerto, K. 595 with The Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Sir Donald Runnicles; the Bach D minor concerto with members of The Philadelphia Orchestra; and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with the New York City-based Le Train Bleu.
McDermott continues to perform with many leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the symphonies of Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Colorado, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Atlanta, San Diego, New Jersey, Columbus, and Baltimore. She has also toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi.
McDermott, who studied at the Manhattan School of Music, is a winner of the Mortimer Levitt Career Development Award for Women, the Young Concert Artists auditions, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She lives in New York City with her husband Michael.
New York Philharmonic String Quartet
The New York Philharmonic String Quartet comprises four principal musicians from the Orchestra: Concertmaster Frank Huang (The Charles E. Culpeper Chair); Principal Second Violin Group Qianqian Li; Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps (The Mr. and Mrs. Frederick P. Rose Chair); and Principal Cello Carter Brey (The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Chair). The group was formed in January 2017, during the Philharmonic’s 175th anniversary season; the New York Philharmonic String Quartet made its debut as the solo ensemble in John Adams’s Absolute Jest in New York in March 2017, and reprised the work on the Orchestra’s EUROPE / SPRING 2017 tour. All four members are multiple prize winners, have appeared as concerto soloists with the Philharmonic and orchestras around the world, and have appeared frequently in the Philharmonic’s chamber music series at David Geffen Hall and Merkin Concert Hall.
Frank Huang has performed at the Marlboro Music Festival, Ravinia’s Steans Institute, Seattle Chamber Music Festival, and Caramoor. He frequently participates in Musicians from Marlboro’s tours and was selected by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to be a member of the prestigious Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two). Before joining the Houston Symphony as concertmaster in 2010, Frank Huang held the position of first violinist of the GRAMMY Award–winning Ying Quartet.
Qianqian Li has performed at major music festivals including Aspen, Tanglewood, Yellow Barn, and Sarasota. As a soloist, she has performed with orchestras in major concert halls in Asia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Before joining the New York Philharmonic, she served as a member of the first violin section of The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for three years, after winning positions with the orchestras of Seattle, Atlanta, and St. Paul in the same period. She has also performed in the Boston, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta symphony orchestras and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Cynthia Phelps performs with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Jupiter Chamber Players, and the Santa Fe, La Jolla, Seattle, Chamber Music Northwest, and Bridgehampton festivals. She has appeared with the Guarneri, Tokyo, Orion, American, Brentano, and Prague Quartets, and the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. She is also a founding member of the chamber group Les Amies, a flute-harp-viola group with Philharmonic Principal Harp Nancy Allen and flutist Carol Wincenc.
Carter Brey has made regular appearances with the Tokyo and Emerson string quartets as well as The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and at festivals such as Spoleto (both in the United States and Italy), and the Santa Fe and La Jolla Chamber Music festivals. He and pianist Christopher O’Riley recorded Le Grand Tango: Music of Latin America, a disc of compositions from South America and Mexico released on Helicon Records.
Program Highlights
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano
New York Philharmonic String Quartet
Frank Huang, violin
Qianqian Li, violin
Cynthia Phelps, viola
Carter Brey, cello
Program to include AMY BEACH Piano Quintet
All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.
Program Notes
Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) in C minor, D. 703 (1820)
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Quartettsatz (Quartet Movement) in C minor, D. 703
Franz Schubert was astonishingly productive in his short life, completing a mind-boggling quantity of solo and choral songs, piano pieces, chamber music, sacred compositions, orchestral pieces, and stage works. But there also exist many compositions he began but did not complete. His Unfinished Symphony is the most famous, but another claimed repertoire status: this Quartettsatz from 1820. Around the time he wrote it, he was grappling with new ideas recently promulgated by Beethoven. The compact power of the Quartettsatz surely confirms his penchant for Beethoven’s dramatic streak. By the time Schubert wrote this movement he had composed 12 of his 15 string quartets, from 1811 through 1816. Those early quartets were destined to be played by the composer’s family circle: Franz playing viola, his brothers violins, his father cello. With the Quartettsatz he embarks on the more ambitious world of his late quartets, of which three complete ones would follow, two in 1824 and one in 1826. And yet, the Quartettsatz does not come across as a transitional work. It is mature and assured, demanding fully professional interpreters—indeed, marking a great advance in the democracy of its quartet-writing. Its nervous opening, marked Allegro assai, pervades the whole movement, often transformed into variants, and the warmhearted second theme, positively soaring when the first violin repeats it, provides contrast without banishing the overriding spirit of unease. The Schubert scholar Brian Newbould maintains that this “is the first work in which Schubert reached full maturity as an instrumental composer (in any medium).” Schubert’s manuscript continues on with an Andante in A-flat major, but that drifts off after just 40 measures, leaving musiclovers regretful that the envisioned quartet remained unfinished—but also grateful that its opening movement achieved the gripping perfection it did.
String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 44, No. 1 (1838)
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-47)
String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 44, No. 1
Molto allegro vivace
Menuetto: Un poco allegretto
Andante espressivo ma con moto
Presto con brio
Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in D major is one of three he composed in 1837-38, busy years during which he also served as music director of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra, produced a series of so-called “historical concerts” in that city, got married, and welcomed his first son into the world. This was the last of the three he completed, but he placed it first in the group when he published them together the following year. “I have just finished my third Quartet, in D major, and it pleases me greatly” he wrote to violinist Ferdinand David in July 1838. “I hope it may please you, too. I think it will, since it is more spirited and seems to me likely to be more grateful to the players than the others.”
The opening of the first movement, with its spirited tempo marking of Molto allegro vivace, fairly bristles with energy, the first violin launching the principal theme against the crackling tremolando background of the other players—an almost orchestral texture. In all of his Op. 44 Quartets, Mendelssohn opts for the fast-slow ordering of the two middle movements. He may have been the all-time master of the scherzo, but in this instance—the only such one in all his quartets—he chooses to fill the second-movement slot not with a scherzo, but rather with what he calls a minuet, harking back to the dance movement that reigned in the time of Haydn and Mozart. A gorgeous slow movement follows, a wistful “song without words” of an Andante. Its opening also displays a vaguely antique character with a neo-Baroque effusion of harmonic suspensions. The finale, with its rush of dance-like energy, would also sound at home if it were played by a full orchestra but it makes wonderful chamber music, too.
INTERMISSION
Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, Op. 67 (1905-07)
AMY MARCY CHENEY BEACH (1867-1944)
Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, Op. 67
Adagio—Allegro moderato
Adagio espressivo
Allegro agitato
On June 28, our audiences heard the Piano Concerto of Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (you may find her biography there). This concert presents her Piano Quintet, which Beach’s biographer Adrienne Fried Block describes as a “concerto without orchestra,” an allusion to how the piano is first among equals, sometimes completely dominating the texture while the string instruments play in unisons or octaves. The Piano Quintet received more than 40 performances during Beach’s lifetime, often with the composer at the piano but sometimes with other interpreters as well. Block considers it a supremely Brahmsian work and has demonstrated that its opening theme is an adaptation of the second theme from the finale of Brahms’ Piano Quintet, a work Beach performed in 1900. Indeed, there are many Brahmsian gestures in this work, but being Brahmsian was not always a ticket to popularity in Beach’s turnof- the-century Boston. Philip Hale, a mainstay of Boston music criticism, allegedly proposed that the doors of Boston’s Symphony Hall should be topped by signs reading “Exit in Case of Brahms.” A review of Beach’s Piano Quintet that appeared in 1908 in the Boston Transcript worried that its composer “courted, perhaps a little too often, the slowly mounting, expanding and finally breaking climax in broad sweep of warm tone.”
And yet, Brahms is only one point of reference for this work. Certain passages, especially in the slow movement, seem the work of someone well acquainted with Wagner—the sinuous yearning of Tristan und Isolde and dark rumblings of Götterdämmerung. One might also point to Liszt, some of whose works were in Beach’s concert repertoire as a pianist. And to the extent that Brahms+Liszt=Franck, one might identify the Piano Quintet as every bit as Franckian as it is Brahmsian.
