Music@Menlo Master Class with Timothy Eddy | Mozart String Quartet K 387

Music@Menlo 2013 Master Class with Timothy Eddy W.A. Mozart - String Quartet in G Major K 387 | Allegro vivace assai Violins: Regi Papa and Nicole Jeong Viola: Kaya Katarzyna Bryla Cello: Michael Katz 00:00 - Mozart Quartet 07:05 - Master Class "Mozart’s wrote his String Quartet in G, K. 387, late in 1782, when he was 26 and a newcomer to Vienna’s musical scene. The Quartet is the first of a set of six quartets that Mozart dedicated to Joseph Haydn. Mozart appreciated that Haydn had elevated the string quartet into a great art form with his own quartets, making the four parts more completely individual and enriching the form’s expressive possibilities with his genius and innovation. Although Mozart had written several earlier quartets, these six were the first ones he composed after becoming closely acquainted with Haydn’s work, and the transformation is unmistakable: the movements are expanded in their structure, the polyphonic textures are more daring and complex, and the ideas behind the writing are more subtle and profound. When Haydn eventually heard a performance of three of these quartets, he made his famous comment to Mozart’s father, Leopold: “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.” The Quartet’s first movement is warmly lyrical. The movement’s textures and moods are subtly variable; but what gives the movement its stamp is Mozart’s signature ability to extend a phrase, to spin it out beyond its expected endpoint, so that the music acquires a gently rhetorical cadence, without stiffness or formality. Especially notable is the middle (development) section, where various individual instruments take turns breaking loose from the texture, wandering away and musing on alternative harmonic possibilities." Note by Misha Amory Video courtesy of Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival and Institute, Atherton, California