Program Notes: From Dvořák to Benshoof

By Christopher DeLaurenti

Born in 1933, Ken Benshoof has composed for an astonishing variety of ensembles and media. He scored several Seattle Rep theatre productions in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and subsequently a pair of radio dramas aired on NPR in the early 1990s. Although he has written for orchestra — Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed his Concerto in Three Movements (2016) in 2019 — Benshoof is chiefly known for his chamber music. He has collaborated with several generations of Seattle musicians as well as fulfilled many commissions for Kronos Quartet.

Five Movements for Piano Trio was written and premiered in 1969. Reflecting on the work in 2024, the composer calls it “a curious piece” among his own compositions. Though craggy and abrasive in places, what we might hear as echoes of the 1960s avant-garde always serve (or push against) a melodic line. Benshoof sought to give equal weight to each instrument in the Trio, making what he describes as “a serious attempt to hold the piano down,” lest the keyboard drown out the violin and cello.  

The piano opens the first movement with sunny, animated chords followed by an ambling cello melody. The music slows with bluesy bent notes by the cellist while the pianist offers a litany of hushed, knotted clusters. As the strings interject emphatic four-note figures, the piano vacillates between a chunky, rapid-fire riff and striding, upwards figurations reminiscent of jazz. The next movement sets a dialogue between a sweet tune on the piano and double-stops (two notes played at once) on the violin and later, the cello. A rising bass line leaps into a flurry of scale-like runs that embellish an urgent duet between the strings.  

Dissonant convulsions and flickering grace notes on the piano characterize the third movement. A duet of loping pizzicati — plucked notes on the cello — and bowed notes on the violin seem helpless to contain glowering punctuations from the keyboard. A lyrical flourish recalls the earlier duet, but only briefly as the music surges to a churning conclusion. The fourth movement starts with a cadenza — a solo designed to showcase the violinist’s virtuosity and emotional expressiveness — and continues with a tumultuous series of exchanges. The finale unites various motifs, timbres and thematic material heard previously.  

Benshoof’s first string quartet, Odds and Ends for String Quartet (1963) has a fateful origin. The Jacovin Quartet premiered the work in 1965; two members of that quartet became stalwart advocates of living composers, Mark Sokol (of the pioneering Concord Quartet) and David Harrington. Both studied with Mark’s father, Vilem Sokol, who was a violist with the Seattle Symphony and longtime conductor of the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras. Harrington, who later founded Kronos Quartet, noted in a 2014 memorial article, “I might not have met Ken had it not been that Mark already knew him.”  

The ebullience of Odds and Ends matches its title with a simmering stew of jazz-inflected melodies and relentless rhythms that not only allude to Bartók but also acknowledge Benshoof’s teacher, Volfgangs Dārziņš (1906–1962). Wistful chordal passages (marked in the score “no vib[rato]”) open and close the quartet. Odds and Ends was performed by Kronos Quartet at the group’s debut concert in 1973 and played extensively during its 2017–2018 touring season.  

Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby — Seattle Symphony flutist and Robert & Clodagh Ash Piccolo — commissioned in Shadow, light for Piccolo & String Trio (1997). In his notes about the piece, the composer writes “this work is cast in six movements which are joined to form three pairs. The first movement is a gentle dialogue which sets up the dance-like second movement. The third and sixth movements owe much to Baroque style. The fourth, like the second, is more of a dance. The fifth movement is rhapsodic and contains a cadenza for the piccolo.” Each movement includes an indication of mood and tempo. The finale, “Confident, but not pushy,” was composed first and presents thematic ideas developed in previous movements. Benshoof adds that “if all goes well, the various questions and tensions provoked in the first five movements find resolution in the sixth.”  

After finishing what was to become his most popular orchestral work — Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” (1893) — and concluding his inaugural year as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) needed a vacation. The Czech composer and his family decamped to Spillville, Iowa, for a summer holiday. He felt at home in the prairie town of Czech-American farmers and their families. Dvořák exclaimed to a friend, “I was walking in the woods by the stream and heard the singing of birds for the first time in eight months!”  

During this sojourn in rural Iowa, Dvořák sketched his String Quartet No. 12 in F major (1893) in three days, completing the work two weeks later. Originally nicknamed “Spillville” by the composer, the work eventually became known in the late 20th century as Dvořák’s “American” quartet — and his most popular chamber music.  

In the opening Allegro non troppo, the viola announces the initial theme against an airy backdrop of tremolo violins. The immediate imitation and elaborations of this melody by the violin not only threads its way through the movement but reappears throughout the quartet.  

Pizzicato cello notes and a swaying 6/8 pattern accompany the melancholy song of the Lento. After momentarily shifting to the cello, the song unfurls further, prodded by an insistent five-note figure in the viola into an aura of happiness and calm. A violin duet reshapes the initial viola theme into a somber conversation, which ends with an aching statement by the cello.  

Marked Molto vivace, this lively scherzo enfolds birdsong in the upper register of the violin, though musicologists and ornithologists continue to debate the exact avian (scarlet tanager or red-eyed vireo) Dvořák heard in Spillville. With hints of capering, down-home fiddling, this movement is the closest the quartet gets to sounding “American.” The closing Vivace ma non troppo culminates in a rondo whose rapidly alternating sections build to an exciting ending on a triumphant F-major chord.