Composed in 1797, Haydn’s six Op. 76 Quartets have long been audience favorites. As the 18th century chronicler Charles Burney observed, the music is “full of invention, fire, good taste and new effects.” Among the “new effects” is the magically luminous opening of the Allegro con spirito that gives the “Sunrise” Quartet its nickname: the first violin traces a limpid arc of melody over quietly sustained chords in the lower voices. As the “sun” surmounts the hazy horizon, a sparkling array of 16th notes breaks out in the treble, gathering brilliance and momentum in its passage down the chain from one instrument to another. Soon the cello turns the first violin’s rising motif on its head and points the way to an elaborate development section that explores darker territory without dimming its essential radiance.

The Adagio opens with two short questioning figures, cadencing first on E-flat major and then on F major. Although E-flat quickly establishes itself as the new home key, the initial ambiguity never disappears, and the rest of the movement is as notable for its tonal elasticity as for its lacy filigree. The vigorous Menuetto, with its chugging triple meter and playfully syncopated Trio section, brings us firmly back down to earth and sets the stage for the rollicking Finale. Haydn uses all the tricks of his trade—chirping grace notes, trills, echo effects, acrobatic leaps, pregnant pauses, and unpredictable twists and turns—to keep the listener continually and delightfully off balance to the very end.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

In 1957, the year American composer Billy Childs was born, Gunther Schuller coined the term “Third Stream” to describe “a new genre of music located about halfway between jazz and classical music.” Although Childs doesn’t identify himself as a Third Stream composer, much of his music is characterized by a fruitful cross-fertilization of jazz and classical elements. A lifelong resident of Los Angeles, he was immersed from childhood in southern California’s diverse musical culture, powered by its vibrant studio scene. “If you’re [a classical musician] in a studio, you have to be able to play with a drum set, you have to be able to play with a click track,” Childs told Downbeat magazine. “You have to be able to play different genres of music. So, there’s more interaction between the genres. And it makes it easier for someone like me, who’s a composer, to create music that combines genres. There’s no attitude, from either side, about [the music being] too classical or too jazzy. I grew up with that ethos, and I was able to experiment and learn a lot about combining genres.”

As a precocious teenage pianist, Childs fell in love with Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, a symphonic depiction of the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, and decided to get a degree in composition from the University of Southern California. By the time he graduated in 1979, he was already playing professionally with the likes of jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and trombonist J. J. Johnson (a notable proponent of the Third Stream movement). As a result, he felt as much of a rapport with Keith Emerson and Herbie Hancock as with Ravel and Stravinsky, a broadmindedness that also came to inform his work as the leader of jazz combos. “I started to look at the jazz ensemble as a kind of chamber ensemble, where piano, bass, drums, and saxophone function kind of in the same spirit as a string quartet might—where everything’s interdependent,” Childs says. Over time, his burgeoning fame as a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger has been counterbalanced  by a growing catalogue of symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and other compositions in a more or less classical vein.

Childs’s association with the Isidore String Quartet dates from 2022, when the ensemble took top honors in the Banff International String Quartet Competition with a concert that included the second of his then three quartets. Subtitled “Awakening,” this powerfully emotional work celebrated Childs's wife’s recovery from a pulmonary embolism and reflects the composer’s long-held belief in the therapeutic power of music. Building on that theme, the Isidore String Quartet subsequently adopted the rubric “Awakening” as what violist Devin Moore calls the “throughline” of their recital programs. They began featuring one of Childs’s works between a quartet by Haydn—illustrating “the awakening of the string quartet” in the late 1700s—and a chamber work by Beethoven or another Romantic composer. Centering Childs’s music, Moore explains, creates a “sort of Venn diagram” that highlights the relationships and commonalities among the different pieces on the program. “Billy’s sound world pulls from so many places, both familiar and unfamiliar—whether it’s jazz or classical or neither of these—that no matter what background you come from, there is some tether that brings you in.”  

© Harry Haskell, 2025

“I am at the height of my powers and must make use of my youth while it lasts,” Robert Schumann confided to his diary in September 1842. Despite its ups and downs—the composer had begun to complain of worrisome bouts of despondency and depression—his 32nd year had truly been an annus mirabilis in terms of chamber music. A surge of creativity had already produced, in quick succession, the three string quartets of Op. 41. Schumann was deeply immersed in his Op. 44 Piano Quintet, and before the year was out, he would finish both the Piano Quartet, Op. 47, and the Op. 88 Phantasiestücke for piano trio.

Clara Schumann, at once her husband’s most sympathetic listener and his most discerning critic, “overheard” the E-flat-major Quintet in progress and pronounced it “a work filled with energy and freshness.” Posterity has confirmed her judgment, for Op. 44 has been one of Schumann’s most beloved works ever since its premiere at Leipzig’s venerable Gewandhaus on January 8, 1843. Clara was at the piano on that occasion, as she had been in November for a private run-through of the quintet in the Schumanns’ home. “It didn’t yet go the way Robert probably intended,” she reflected after the rehearsal, “but I think it should improve later on.” Among other revisions, Schumann subsequently composed a new and improved middle section for the slow movement and added a second Trio section to the Scherzo

Schumann’s confident mastery and irrepressible energy are apparent from the outset of the quintet. The boldly striding theme of the Allegro brillante, leaping upward by minor sixths, is balanced by a gentler variant. After a short bridge passage, the cello and viola take up yet another version of the theme, reshaping it into a smoothly interlocking melodic arch that rises stepwise with successive repetitions. Schumann’s economy of means is as impressive as his command of thematic transformation: everything that happens henceforth in the Allegro brillante derives from the basic material presented in the first 72 bars.

In similar fashion, the halting, dirge-like theme of the second movement, in plaintive C minor, melds seamlessly into a serene C-major episode of transcendent beauty. The melody reemerges in the agitated middle section, buried in the viola part, as the music modulates from F minor to F major and finally back to C minor. In the breathless Scherzo, the swelling waves of triplets are interrupted by two Trios, the first sweetly lyrical in character, the second strenuous and demonic. The finale reprises the brisk, four-square mood of the beginning. A majestic double fugue, incorporating the first movement’s theme in slower note values, brings Schumann’s evergreen masterpiece to an exhilarating conclusion.    

© Harry Haskell, 2025