To our beloved Roosevelt Island Concerts audience,
We are delighted to invite you to a special performance Sunday, October 5 at 7:00 pm at Good Shepherd Center, 543 Main Street, Roosevelt Island. We will be offering an unusual concert, consisting of an arc of movements from music by Bach, Beethoven, and John Cage, played without interruption. In this era of streaming we can easily design playlists—this concert could be thought of as a specially-designed, live, meditative playlist, a respite from the chaos of the present-day world. We hope you can join us!
First we are playing a quartet arrangement of a movement from a Bach Cantata, “Vergnugte Ruh.” “Vergnugte Ruh” translates as “contented rest,” and the subject of this cantata is a state of spiritual peace and tranquility. In the original cantata, the alto sings:
Contented rest, beloved delight of the soul,
One can find you not in hell’s sins
But rather in heaven’s concord;
You alone strengthen the weak breast:And so nothing but virtue’s gifts shall
Have a home in my heart.
Next is the slow movement from Beethoven’s first quartet, Op. 18 No. 1, Adagio affetuoso ed appassionato, which was inspired by the burial vault scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Beethoven’s sketches for the movement include French phrases that translate to “he comes to the tomb,” “despair,” “he kills himself,” and “the last sighs.”
John Cage wrote his String Quartet in Four Parts in 1949-50. Each movement corresponds to a season; the movement we are playing, Quietly Flowing Along, corresponds to summer. Cage was interested in composing music to “sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” (From an interview with Jonathan Cott, 1963.)
Beethoven’s last quartet, Op. 135, is known for the question Muß es sein? (Must it be?) asked at the beginning of the final movement. Before that existential question, Beethoven placed the Lento assai, cantabile e tranquillo that we are playing, which Beethoven designated in early sketches “Süsser Ruhegesang Oder Friedengesang,” sweet song of calm or peace.
The last piece on our curated playlist/concert is the final fugue from Bach’s Art of the Fugue, a four-voice triple fugue, in which three subjects are developed and combined simultaneously. Bach worked on the Art of the Fugue during the last decade of his life, and he died before he completed this fugue—the fugue drifts off mid-sentence, so to speak, and the autograph manuscript contains a note in Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach’s handwriting stating, “Über dieser Fuge, wo der Name B A C H im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben.” (“While working on this fugue, which introduces the name BACH [for which the English notation would be Bb-A-C-B] in the countersubject, the composer died.”)
We conclude with a chorale Bach dictated from his deathbed, “Vor Deinen Thron Tret Ich Hiermit” (“before your throne I now appear”), a meditation on mortality and the anticipation of facing God.
We hope you can join us this Sunday for this quiet meditation.
This performance is made possible in part by the generous support of RIOC’s Public Purpose Fund
Suggested donation is $25, and $15 for seniors and students.
In the next concert in our series we are excited to present cellist Raman Ramakrishnan and pianist Benjamin Hochman in works by Beethoven and Britten. This will take place on Saturday, November 1, at 7:30, at Good Shepherd Center. Mark your calendars!
Here’s our Roosevelt Island Concerts presentation of Schubert:Symphony No.5 in August 2021 at the Good Shepherd Chapel.
More information about Roosevelt Island Concerts is available at our website.
Warmly,
Your Roosevelt Island Concerts team
Iris, Ralph, Marc, Benjamin, Yi-heng
