Tesla Quartet HAYDN, RAVEL, STRAVINSKY

Our debut album is all about taking a look at the familiar in a new light, a process of reflection. As we approached the 10 year milestone as an ensemble, we found ourselves looking back over the last decade for inspiration. One obvious pillar of our artistic identity has been Joseph Haydn, whose quartets we have performed in every season without fail since the very beginning. And what better place to begin? The C Major Quartet, Op.54 No.2 has become one of our favourites in recent seasons, particularly because, after having already written 41 quartets, Haydn somehow manages to produce a work of sheer brilliance and utter beauty, still toying with the conventions and expectations he himself established for the genre.

Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major has been my favourite quartet since the first time I heard it at a summer music camp as a young teenager, and it’s the piece that motivated me to dedicate my life to string quartets. My colleagues and I all agreed that this work had to be on the album, but how would we relate it to Haydn, who had been dead almost a century before Ravel even conceived of his singular quartet? One of the pioneering Neo-Classicists of the early 20^th Century, Ravel was constantly reaching back through time and bringing old forms into new light. The quartet itself can even be seen as a reflection upon itself, with thematic material from the first movement appearing throughout the whole work, recast in different light, time, and space.

I have always lamented the fact that Ravel only wrote one string quartet, so I began looking through his piano music to see if there were any pieces I could arrange for the quartet. It didn’t take me long to find the elegiac Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, a short piano piece Ravel composed in homage to Haydn on the centenary of his death in 1809. I found that his Menuet antique, which the composer had later orchestrated himself, worked well as a quartet, as did the diminutive Menuet in C-sharp minor, published posthumously.

How did we make the leap to Stravinsky? His friendship with Ravel and shared Neo-Classical spirit bring their musical kinship to life. But while Ravel seems to delight in the seamless interweaving of past and present, Stravinsky rips the old styles from their ancient roots and thrusts them vigorously into the modern era with a vitality akin to Haydn – just another reminder that there is always more than one view of history.

So rather than starting at the beginning, we find ourselves at the turn of the 20^th Century with Ravel’s String Quartet, reflecting on a genre that has been perhaps the most intimate and personal for all composers since Haydn’s time. As the minuets weave their way through the album, the lines between past and present blur, creating a new time and space to enjoy these wonderful works. (Ross Snyder)