JESSIE MONTGOMERY
Born in New York City, 1981
Currently resides in Chicago
Strum (2006, rev. 2008-2019)
Jessie Montgomery began classical violin lessons at age four, but she learned just as much from the days she spent at her father’s rehearsal studio for rock and jazz bands in Manhattan’s East Village. Since studying violin performance at The Juilliard School and film scoring at New York University, she has established herself as an essential composer, performer, and educator.
A true musician’s musician, Montgomery leans on her history of playing orchestral and chamber music at the highest level to craft scores that feel as good to perform as they sound. Strum, one of her most often-played compositions, has gone through many iterations since it was first conceived in 2006 as a string quintet with two cellos. She tailored it into a string quartet version with revisions in 2008 and 2012, and it became a marquis piece for the Catalyst Quartet, of which Montgomery was a founding member. Their recording served as the title track of her debut album in 2015. The latest revision in 2019 added an optional bass part to allow for performances by full string orchestras.
The primary driver for the piece is a strumming gesture, with the string players plucking both up and down in the manner of a guitar. “Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement,” Montgomery wrote in a program note, “the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, 1854
Died in Moravká Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, 1928
String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata” (1923)
Leoš Janáček, already world famous for his operas written in the Czech language, wrote the first of his two string quartets at the age of 69, in the midst of a long and flirtatious correspondence with a much younger woman, even though both were married. He wrote to her that, in shaping his quartet, “I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata.” Janáček was referring to the novella Tolstoy titled after the Beethoven Violin Sonata No. 9, nicknamed “Kreutzer” for its dedicatee. In Tolstoy’s story, the climax is a scene in which a seething husband is driven to murder after watching his wife, a pianist, perform that sonata with her suspected lover, a violinist.
After an Adagio introduction, every portion of the quartet bears the tempo heading con moto (“with movement”), an indication of the persistent forward drive in Janáček’s fragmented, energized approach to manipulating motives. A stepwise theme in the third movement makes an oblique reference to one of the melodies from Beethoven’s sonata, and a solo at the start of the fourth movement is meant to be played “like in tears,” hinting at the tragic outcome of Tolstoy’s love triangle.
FLORENCE PRICE
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1887
Died in Chicago, 1953
Fantasie nègre No. 2 in G Minor (1932)
At a time when America’s elite musical circles were essentially closed to women, let alone women of color, the Black composer and pianist Florence Price asserted her place in classical music with an array of masterfully crafted scores that are only just now earning the mainstream recognition they deserve. Building on her studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, Price developed a compositional voice steeped in her cultural experience, informed by the racial tension in her hometown of Little Rock and her time in the creative hotbed of Chicago during the Great Migration. With the premiere of Price’s First Symphony in 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra became the first major orchestra to perform a work by a Black woman.
Price’s most celebrated compositions merged the standard forms of classical music with material rooted in Black culture. (That endeavor continued a path popularized in the 1890s by the Czech visitor Antonín Dvořák, who famously tried his own hand at weaving tropes from Black spirituals and Native American music into his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” composed while he was directing the National Conservatory of Music in New York.) Price’s interest in mixing European and Black traditions is evident in the French title of her Fantasie nègre No. 2 in G Minor, evoking the freeform piano fantasies of Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin. The original themes sound as if they could be quotations of actual spirituals, especially when they lean into pentatonic modes, while the artful harmonizations and flights of fancy revel in the improvisatory, virtuosic legacy of 19th-century piano repertoire.
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, 1841
Died in Prague, 1904
Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81 (1887)
Throughout his career, Antonín Dvořák followed the example of his mentor Brahms and grappled with the old, established forms of chamber music. As a violist himself, Dvořák proved to be especially well-attuned to the genre, whether writing for string quartet (a format that long flummoxed Brahms) or an ensemble such as the piano quintet, combining piano and string quartet.
Dvořák wrote his first Piano Quintet in A Major in 1872, but he withdrew it after the premiere. He started to revise that score in 1887 and then decided to just start fresh on the Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, a chamber music masterpiece that balanced Dvořák’s intuitive feel for melody, command of formal construction, and celebration of his Czech roots.
The opening melody for cello, accompanied only by piano, sets a relaxed tone for the quintet, until the full ensemble steps on the cello’s last note and counters with a forceful theme in A-minor. The tonal dichotomy, torn between A-major and A-minor, plays out throughout the first movement and sets up a larger context for the whole work. That pattern relates back to Czech folk music, a link that becomes more explicit in the second movement, which Dvorak identified as a Dumka — a Slavic term, with Ukrainian origins, for a type of folk music characterized by wild mood swings.
After two substantial movements spanning 25 minutes or more, a spirited Scherzo clears the air with music in the style of a Furiant, a fast Czech dance. As in the Dumka, pizzicato passages bring the ensemble closer to the plucking and strumming of folk music, like the sound of the zither that Dvořák’s father played. The finale once again straddles major and minor modes, and it marries rustic dance rhythms with the more studious aspects of Dvořák’s craft, even incorporating a proper fugue.
© 2025 Aaron Grad