Concertino for String Quartet
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Stravinsky wrote his Concertino for string quartet in the summer of 1920 while living in France. Alfred Pochon, the first violinist in the Flonzaley String Quartet, had approached the composer about writing a work specifically for that quartet. In his Autobiography Stravinsky detailed the creation of the new work:

M. Pochon wished to introduce a contemporary work into their almost exclusively classical repertoire, and asked me to write them an ensemble piece, in form and length of my own choosing, to appear in the programmes of their numerous tours. So it was for them that I composed my Concertino, a piece in one single movement, treated in the form of a free sonata allegro with a definitely concertante part for the first violin.

The actual composition of the Concertino took from July through September 1920, while Stravinsky was living in Carantec, a small fishing village. It was not a particularly enjoyable summer for the composer, who wrote to a friend:

I can't say I like Brittany very much . . . the place is full of conventional middle-class

trippers, who can't afford to go to Deauville. It's not at all amusing-people who start singing outside our windows when we're in bed, and louder than is necessary in the streets at night; but apparently they think they're justified in letting themselves go when on holiday. I'm sleeping badly and composing music.

The Concertino, spare in both its harmonic idiom and emotional scope, has never become especially popular. As the composer notes, this brief (six-minute) work is in sonata form, and its most immediately attractive feature is an extended cadenza-like passage for first violin at the center of the movement. The Concertino opens with a rising scale for the first violin and cello (in C major) and for viola (in B major). The resulting harmonic friction will be very much a part of the language of the Concertino, and the rising scale figure recurs several times.

The Andante center section makes virtuoso demands on the first violin, which is double-stopped throughout, and the music from the opening section returns before the brief concluding Andante; Stravinsky directs that the work's final bar be performed sospirando ("sighing" or "plaintively").