The Tippett Quartet makes its Toronto début at Walter Hall as the guests of the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto this afternoon. They’re offering a very serious programme of chamber music that also includes a suite from the movie Psycho, which had a soundtrack by composer Bernard Herrmann.
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The Tippett Quartet has led a charmed life since its founding 15 years ago, landing a Wigmore Hall début in the first season.
They quartet named itself after composer Sir Michael Tippett, who had died in January, 1998, and has made its reputation not just with fine playing, but as a champion of British composers, even those most everyone else has forgotten about.
But Bernard Herrmann, who died in 1975, was not British, but every inch a native New Yorker who trained in composition at the Juilliard School. He had a stroke of luck in working on Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds, which created mass panic because listeners thought that this was news, not a radio drama.
Herrmann followed Welles to Hollywood to write the score for Citizen Kane. Unlike Welles, Herrmann was able to keep turning out masterpieces, while dreaming of returning to the world of the concert hall as an art music composer and orchestra conductor. He had a long and fruitful association with Alfred Hitchcock.
The composer wrote some concert pieces after he parted ways with Hitchcock in the mid-1960s. These included two works — the 20-minute Echoes and the three-movement Souvernirs de Voyage for string quartet and clarinet — the Tippetts recorded along with a suite of music from Psycho to mark the composer’s centenary in 2011.
Because Hermann wrote the score to Psycho for string orchestra, it translates very effectively for the quartet in Richard Birchall’s arrangement.
Although it was no longer new in 1960, Herrmann’s hard-edged sound and preference for repeated musical patterns rather than clear melodies was a shock in Hollywood when he arrived there 20 years earlier.
“I wanted the sound of pure ice-water,” the composer told an interviewer of the chilling music needed to accompany Hitchcock’s movie.
Herrmann succeeded.
The Tippetts — violinist John Mills and Jeremy Isaac, violist Julia O’Riordan and cellist Bozidar Vukovic — perform the 10-minute Psycho Suite today at their 1:30 p.m. concert at Walter Hall. Also on the programme are Sir Michael Tippett’s final, fifth string quartet and Beethoven’s favourite late quartet, No. 14, the great Op. 131.
You can find all the programme details here.
There is also an excellent website devoted to Bernard Herrmann here.
And here are the Tippetts performing the Psycho Suite in 2011:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
