Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Jupiter Symphony Players Perform Huber, Gade and Mendelssohn

The title given the program at Monday afternoon's recital by the Jupiter Symphony Players was In & Out of Leipzig and featured works by composers - Hans Huber, Niels Gade and Felix Mendelssohn - who were all connected in one way or another with the Leipzig Conservatory.  As usual, St. Stephen's Church on West 66th was filled almost to capacity for the occasion.

The program opened with Gade's String Quartet in E minor (1877).  Gade's association with Leipzig began when his first symphony was rejected in 1842 by the Royal Danish Orchestra which at the time employed Gade as a violinist.  Undeterred, Gade promptly sent the symphony to Mendelssohn who premiered it with the Gewendhaus in 1843 to great acclaim.  This mark of appreciation no doubt had a great deal to do with Gade's decision to relocate to Leipzig where he taught at the Conservatory and held the post of associate conductor with the Gewendhaus.  In the end, he succeeded Mendelssohn as chief conductor following the latter's death.  Gade might have remained happily in Leipzig had not Prussia gone to war with Denmark, an eventuality that forced the composer to return to his native country where he became director of the Copenhagen Musical Society.  The Quartet in E minor has no opus number and was never published during Gade's lifetime though he did revise it in 1889, the same year he composed his only published quartet, the D major, Op. 63.  It was the 1889 revision that was performed at this recital and it turned out to be quite a competent work.  I couldn't help but wonder why Gade would have gone to all the trouble of revising a work written twelve years earlier if he still had not intended to have it published.  Could it be that the composer felt the work did not meet the high standards set for him by his mentor Mendelssohn?

This was followed by Huber's Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 136 (1914) for clarinet, flute, horn, bassoon and piano.  Though Huber, a Swiss, is best remembered today for his five operas and eight symphonies, he also composed a great amount of chamber music.  The quintet was highly regarded by the Swiss critic Ernst Isler who wrote:
"The form and musical language are masterly... This work shows that the music of Huber never ages."
When today we think of nineteenth century chamber music we tend to focus on pieces for strings or for strings and piano.  Though Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert all wrote masterpieces for wind instruments that have become part of the standard repertoire, many pieces by less famous composers have fallen out of fashion and are not heard as often as they deserve.  When they are played, they can be striking simply by virtue of their unfamiliarity.

After intermission, the ensemble closed the program with one of Mendelssohn's most popular chamber works, the Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845).  In contrast to the two works performed in the first half, Mendelssohn's piece is one of the best known works in the chamber repertoire even if not quite so famous as his own Trio No. 1 in D minor written six years earlier.  In both works Mendelssohn was heavily influenced by Beethoven's trios, particularly the "Archduke," Op. 97, that was performed by this same ensemble at their last recital.  It was Beethoven - somewhat ironically, considering that his own chosen instrument was the piano - who more than any other composer created a parity among the three trio instruments rather than simply employing the strings as a form of continuo as had Haydn.  Mendelssohn's trios, however, differ sharply from Beethoven's in their extreme romanticism.  In the C minor, this can be heard most clearly in the second movement marked andante espressivo and in the final movement in which the composer quotes a sixteenth century chorale from the Genevan Psalter in order to create in the listener's mind a sense of the antique.  It's a brilliant stratagem that raises the music to a spiritual level that could not otherwise have been attained.  Mendelssohn dedicated the trio to Louis Spohr while modestly claiming that he had hesitated to do so because "Nothing seemed good enough to me, and in fact neither does this trio."

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