String Quartet Concert Program Notes

---

String Quartet Concert

Saturday, November 15, 2025 - 7:00 pm

Edward R. Driggers City of Greer Center for the Arts

804 Trade St, Greer, SC 29651

Join us for an evening filled with string quartet classics and lesser-known gems!

Program Notes By: Randy Lee

Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1887), String Quartet No. 2 – III. “Notturno” (1881)

Borodin was a Russian Romantic composer and chemist of Georgian–Russian parentage. He was one of the prominent 19th-century composers known as "The Five", a group dedicated to producing a "uniquely Russian" kind of classical music. Borodin is known best for his symphonies, his two string quartets, the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia and his opera Prince Igor.

The String Quartet No. 2 was written in 1881. It was dedicated to Borodin’s wife Ekaterina Protopova. Some scholars, such as Borodin's biographer Serge Dianin, suggest that the quartet was a 20th anniversary gift and that it evokes the couple's first meeting in Heidelberg. Of its four movements, the third movement "Notturno" is the most famous. It opens with the lyrical melody of the movement played by cello, Borodin’s instrument, which is clearly his “voice” in the work. This theme also provided the tune for “And This Is My Beloved” in the musical Kismet, which is based on melodies taken from Borodin’s works. The beautiful movement often features the interplay between two instruments in a sort of “call and response” format suggesting a conversation between the instruments. 

Amy Beach (1867-1944) – Quartet for Strings in One Movement (1921)

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Her "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers of her era to succeed without the benefit of European training and was known as one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany.

Beach's single string quartet is one of her more mature works. The significance Beach bestowed on this piece is notable, given that it did not feature a piano part which she would perform, as did many of her other works. The final work, completed in Rome, consists of one movement divided into three sections, and thematically speaking, follows an arch form (A B C B1 A1). The piece uses three different Eskimo or Inuit melodies throughout the work: "Summer Song", "Playing at Ball", and "Itataujang's Song", taken from Franz Boas' book on the Alaskan Inuit tribes. The opening “slow” section introduces the first two songs, the first with solo viola and the second with each of the instruments. The middle faster section features the third song and develops this tune through a fugue and other musical inventions. The initial themes return to close the piece in the final slow section. Beach's use of Inuit and Native American tunes became a marked feature in several of her other works, which she used as a means of bringing stylistic modernity to her sound through the appropriation and re-contextualization of these melodies.

Danish String Quartet (2002 - present) – Ye Honest Bridal Couple (2014) / Polska from Dorotea (2017)

The Danish String Quartet debuted at the Copenhagen Summer Festival in 2002 and quickly made a name for themselves with their award-winning performances of quartets by Beethoven, Haydn, and Brahms. They currently tour all over, performing and appearing in master classes and workshops in Europe and the U.S.

In addition to the classics, the Danish String Quartet derives great pleasure from traditional Nordic folk music. The quartet has released three albums of their arrangements of this folk music, Wood Works (2014), Last Leaf (2017), and Keel Road (2024). The following are from the quartet’s program notes regarding tonight's pieces:

Ye Honest Bridal Couple: 

These are a set of two traditional wedding tunes, one from the Faroe Islands and one from the Danish island, Fanø. The traditional music of the Faroe Islands is primarily vocal, and the first tune of this set, I Ærlige Brudefolk, is the first song to be sung and danced at Faroese weddings. It is said that it needs to be sung with such devoutness that the skirts of the women won’t move in the slightest – it is a wedding after all! We have paired this with Første Brudestykke from Sønderho – the first part of a set of three sønderhonings that to this day are still played at weddings on Fanø. These melodies date back several hundreds of years and hold a very special place in the Danish folk music tradition. The dance is in 3/4 time, but the music is in duple time, making the total experience of playing and dancing to this music unique.

Polska from Dorotea:

A famous polska, attributed to Swedish fiddler, teacher, and cantor Johan August Andersson (1866-1902) who lived in the village of Dorotea in Lapland. Andersson had quite a tragic life, losing his wife and daughter in childbirth, which resulted in a local scandal when he entered the church mid-service to publicly curse God. He was subsequently fired from his teaching position, but was allowed to stay as a cantor, because he was such a good fiddler. Later his mental derangement worsened until he was primarily known in Dorotea as “Crazy Andersson”, spending his last years alone in a small house in the middle of the village. This tune has a natural sense of gravity and swing, and an almost la follia-like progression. And although the polska dance usually tends to be a tad slower, we like it when played with “sturm and drang”!