Program Notes: From Antonín Dvořák to Béla Bartók

By Leilani Polk

In the Seattle Symphony’s Chamber Series, orchestra musicians take the lead in programming, submitting ideas of intimate works they wish to perform that are ultimately turned into full-fledged concerts like the one you are about to experience. This first program of the 2025/2026 series features two trios selected by Assistant Principal Viola Mara Gearman and after intermission, a quartet picked by Viola Olivia Chew. 

“I love the combination of trios that include viola, because usually the viola has more of an individual voice,” Mara explained. The program opens with Mara joined by Oboe Chengwen Winnie Lai and pianist (and sometime Symphony photographer) Carlin Ma in Charles Martin Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano.  

Loeffler was a German-born composer, violinist and for three years, a student of Joseph Joachim, who became a major champion of Loeffler’s music. When Loeffler moved to the U.S. at age 20, he brought a letter of recommendation from Joachim. Loeffler served as assistant concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 20 years, resigning in 1903 to focus on teaching and writing music until his death in 1935. 

The Two Rhapsodies were written 1901 and are revisions of two songs from a set of three Loeffler wrote in 1898 for bass voice, clarinet and piano, originally settings of poems by the French symbolist poet Maurice Rollinat. Mara first played the Two Rhapsodies as a member of the Oregon Symphony. “Loeffler is not the most well-known composer, but musicians always love his work. It’s like French Romanticism, with lots of amazing colors.” 

Two Rhapsodies (The Pond and The Bagpipe) are mournfully sublime explorations of the three chosen instruments and their distinct sonorities. The piano often plays in the dramatic lower registers, while the oboe and viola deliver a combination of simple, haunting harmonies and ornately flowing lines. The three instruments follow and copy each other throughout both movements. 

The second trio, Antonín Dvořák’s Terzetto in C major for Two Violins and Viola, finds Mara with Seattle Symphony Violin Wayne Lee and frequent chamber music collaborator and University of Washington Associate Violin Professor Rachel Lee Priday. According to Mara, “If I had to pick only five composers I could listen to for the rest of my life, Dvořák would be one of them. There’s something wistful, there’s something hopeful… but then, also, incredible energy all the time. There’s just so much vitality and great rhythmic undercurrents.” 

A mid-career work Dvořák composed about five years before his stint in North America, the Terzetto in C was written over a few days in January 1887, with the first public performances given just a few months later in Prague by Karel Ondříček (brother of the virtuoso violinist František Ondříček), Jan Buchal and Jaroslav Šťastný.    

The first movement serves as an introduction with an upbeat, lyrical opening theme before the second movement, marked dolce, molto espressivo (sweetly, very expressively), picks things up with agitated, dotted rhythms. The third movement is a scherzo with the sort of cross-rhythm that often appears in Dvořák’s music, while the fourth and final movement, initially marked Poco adagio, is a theme and 10 short variations, with several changes of tempo during the movement, and distinct rhythms and dynamics within each variation until the Molto allegro introduces the simple, rapid rhythms of the last two concluding variations. 

Mara said both of the works “really feel like something out of an English countryside by a very active pond.” 

The second half of the program features Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor, with Symphony Viola Olivia Chew joined by Second Assistant Concertmaster Emerson Millar, Associate Principal Second Violin Cameron Daly and Cello Eric Han. “It’s almost a requirement for violists to love Bartók since he is probably the most famous composer to have ever written a viola concerto,” Olivia said of her selection. “I think his music always has a certain kind of character — playful, quirky but always with a sense of heaviness and gravity.” 

Completed in 1909, Bartók’s First String Quartet is composed of three movements played without breaks: Lento—Allegretto—Introduzione (Allegro)—Allegro vivace (slow—moderately fast—fast, with an introduction). It is among the works inspired in part by Bartók’s unrequited love for the violinist Stefi Geyer; in a letter to her, he called the first movement a “funeral dirge” and its opening is similar to a motif that first appeared in his Violin Concerto No. 1, a work also dedicated to Geyer but not released until after his death. The slow fugue of the first movement pays homage to the fugal opening of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, marked by extreme rhythmic tension and contrapuntal freedom as the four individual players turn, shift, come together and oppose each other. Suffused with a sense of yearning and loss, the first movement is left behind as the tempo of following two movements quickens and the mood of the work lightens considerably.  

The finale is marked by several recurring motifs and exemplifies Bartók’s early folk-based Hungarian style. This was before he fully aspired to explore his country’s cultural music idioms into his own compositions, but was dipping his toes in, so to speak. Here, he quotes a Hungarian folksong “Fly, Peacock, Fly” (the subject also of Zoltán Kodály’s later “Peacock” Variations). The song’s theme is about the liberation of the spirit and the quartet ultimately ends on a positive note. 

“The first time I heard this piece, my mind was blown,” Olivia said. She’d been playing piano since age 4 and at that point, had mostly been exposed to Mozart and Beethoven piano sonatas. “This was something completely different. It felt like I was experiencing every single emotion all at once. I was overwhelmed by the clashes in the harmony, the melancholic lyricism, the relentless twang of the open E-string in the violins in the last movement. I had never heard music like this before and it was my first experience having an emotional connection to a piece of art … I've wanted to play this piece for a long time and I'm so excited to finally get to perform it for the first time!”