On Monday evening, the Jupiter Players performed the first of their three summertime recitals at Christ & St. Stephen's Church on West 69th Street, one of the few ecclesiastical spaces in the neighborhood to boast air conditioning. The first part of the program consisted of works from the French repertoire by Jean-Phillipe Rameau and Louis Théodore Gouvy while the second half featured one of Mendelssohn's finest chamber works.
The program opened with Rameau's 6th Concert en Sextuor for three violins, viola and two cellos. Along with Lully, Rameau was the most important French composer of the Baroque era. He is best known today for his operas; but was already age 50 when he wrote his first, Hippolyte et Aricie, that was so innovative in its approach to operatic composition that it quickly became something of a succès de scandale. In addition to opera, however, Rameau also composed a single work of chamber music, the Pièces de Clavecin en concerts (1741). The five pieces contained therein differed significantly from the then prevalent Italian trio sonatas in the emphasis they placed on the harpsichord which here became central to the composition rather than merely a form of continuo. Together with a sixth piece taken from a miscellany of keyboard works, including La Poule and L'Egyptienne, they were transcribed in 1768 by Jacques-Joseph-Marie Decroix, a lawyer and early admirer of Rameau's music, and entitled Six Concerts en sextuor. It was the sixth that was performed on Monday evening; I found it thoroughly enjoyable for the potpourri of styles it encompassed.
The next work was Gouvy's String Quintet in G major, Op. 55 (1869) for two violins, viola and two cellos. If it was Rameau's foray into opera that brought him his greatest fame, it was Gouvy's failure to work in the same genre that consigned him to oblivion. There was little place in nineteenth century France for a composer who devoted himself solely on instrumental music, no matter how accomplished his works may have been. Though Gouvy had the enthusiastic support of a number of prominent composers, most notably Berlioz, the public wanted nothing to do with him if he were unwilling to produce the operatic works they craved. It was only in the late twentieth century, when his Requiem was finally recorded, that Gouvy began to receive some form of recognition. The present work, while not necessarily modeled after Schubert's Quintet, though possessing the same unusual instrumentation, was most definitely influenced by it. Unfortunately, Gouvy's quintet possessed little of the genius displayed throughout Schubert's masterpiece. It was competent but, although there were some lovely passages in the second movement andantino con moto, it was not particularly memorable.
After intermission, the program concluded with Mendelssohn's String Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20 (1825). No one would argue that this constituted one of the high points of the nineteenth century chamber repertoire. Along with the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Octet, written while the composer was still only a teenager, was considered the first indisputable proof of his genius; and certainly even Mozart at that age had failed to produce anything that could surpass it. Although the double string quartet form had been explored earlier by Louis Spohr, Mendelssohn's opus differed radically in that all eight instruments were melded together to create a true symphonic experience rather than breaking off to play individual parts. That this was deliberate can be determined from the composer's handwritten note on the autograph score:
"The Octet must be played in the style of a symphony in all parts; the pianos and fortes must be precisely differentiated and be more sharply accentuated than is ordinarily done in pieces of this type."
Indeed, Mendelssohn later orchestrated the third movement scherzo, said to have been inspired by the Walpurgis Nacht scene in Goethe's Faust, as a replacement for the third movement minuet in his First Symphony at its premiere by the London Philharmonic Society in 1829.
The Octet was the highlight of the evening. All the performers involved joined together to give an unusually strong ensemble performance and received a well deserved standing ovation at the work's conclusion.
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