In 1939, when he began the painting The Sunlit Terrace, Pierre Bonnard and his partner, Marthe de Méligny, of 50 years lived in Normandy, France. The next year, the Nazis would invade France, forcing Bonnard and his wife, in their 70s, to flee to Vichy. Between 1939 and 1946, Bonnard lived under Nazi occupation and would lose a close friend, his brother, and then his wife. From his destroyed home in Normandy, after his return, he finished The Sunlit Terrace.
	The painting, however, reflects none of that experience. In orange- and violet-reds, it is a wide landscape of a garden on a summer day. On either side of the garden are two sides of a house, one with an awning and one with a window looking into a room where someone is reading.  It is a picturesque scene and typical of Bonnard, lush with color and framed by architecture. Like most of his other paintings, it is likely painted from memory.  His output is filled with candid paintings of his wife in domestic tranquility, memories of happy days, though his life was often complex and his relationships strained. Bonnard’s paintings are manufactured memories, idealized renderings of hoped-for realities.
	The Piano Sonata no. 30 in E Major, op. 109 is one of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, written after he had stopped performing due to his deafness. There is a rumor that the low trills of the B-section are the only sounds Beethoven, now significantly deaf, could hear, and only because of the incredible vibrations they would have caused. There is little to substantiate that claim, but what would hearing music have been like for Beethoven? No doubt that his inner ear was extraordinary, but his music must have sounded distant and muffled, like an echo of a distant love. 
	This string quartet is, ultimately, about memory, about how we remember, hear, process, and forget music. When, after the actual sounds have long died away, we try to recall a long-forgotten melody, and it comes back transfigured by time and distance, what does this music sound like?

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Recorded June 5, 2019 in St. Mark's Church, London by 

Djumash Poulsen, Violin
Roberts Balanas, Violin
Varinia Oyola-Rebaza, Viola
Sarah Gait, Cello

String Quartet

Jon Paul Mayse