I went to Friday afternoon to hear the Honors Chamber Music Recital at Paul Hall. It lasted a full two hours including intermission and featured three well known pieces by Brahms and Schubert. Before the musicians began playing, violinist Joseph Lin took the stage to make introductory remarks and to correct the program notes that had listed him as the sole coach for all three works. He indicated that other faculty members - among them Joseph Kalichstein, Ida Kafavian, Sylvia Rosenberg and Laurie Smukler - had been involved as well. He also stressed that what we were about to hear was not a finished product but a work still in progress.
The program opened with Brahms's String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51, No. 1 (1873). Brahms, forever hearing behind him Beethoven's footsteps, was a perfectionist. He labored painstakingly over his works before allowing them to be published and ruthlessly destroyed any attempt he deemed unsuccessful. As Misha Amory writes on the Brentano Quartet's website:
"...one famous story has him revisiting a house he had lived in years earlier, and, to the astonishment of the tenants, ripping into a wall to extract sheets of music he had used to plug up a leak."
According to rumor, Brahms discarded twenty or more quartets before allowing publication of the C minor and A minor by which time he was already forty years old. One might fear then that the final attempt would be so overworked that it would be lacking in all emotion and spontaneity. But that is not the case with this quartet. It is, if anything, more impassioned than the bulk of Brahms's compositions. Though some critics have suggested that this display of sentiment may have been influenced by the recent death of the composer's mother, there is no direct evidence to support this. The work was performed at this recital by Katherine Kyu Hyeon Lim and David Chang, violins; Robert Donowick, viola; and Noah Koh, cello.
The next work was Schubert's String Quartet in A minor, D. 804, Op. 29 (1824) nicknamed the "Rosamunde Quartet." In his approach to composition, Schubert might be in a sense considered the opposite of Brahms. Compositions fairly poured forth in a steady stream from his pen - he completed more than 1,500 during the course of his abbreviated career - and his output only increased as he grew more aware of his impending death and how little time remained. As the syphilis that would kill him four years later entered its final phase, Schubert experienced a mood of profound despair as he composed this quartet and that following it, in the same year, the even more famous D. 810 quartet, "Death and the Maiden." In the latter, which takes as its source the composer's 1817 lied, the theme of death is pervasive throughout. The D. 804, also based on an earlier work, the incidental music Schubert had composed for Helmina von Chézy's 1823 drama, while not so bleak in outlook as the D. 810 nevertheless projects a feeling of wistful regret. Both quartets display a remarkable advance from Schubert's dozen earlier attempts in the same genre. It as though the knowledge of death caused him to look within himself and goaded him to ever greater heights of creativity.
This was not the first time I'd heard the Calliope Quartet, the ensemble that performed the Schubert. Last May, I had heard the same musicians give an excellent interpretation of Bartok's First Quartet at the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar Recital. Though all the members - including Julia Glenn, violin; Molly Goldman, viola; and Hélène Werner, cello - played extremely well, I was most impressed at both performances by Tianyang Gao who showed exceptional talent on first violin.
After intermission, the program concluded with Brahms's Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25 (1856-1861). This was an early work in which Brahms, perhaps unable to disguise his feelings for his beloved Clara (who in fact played the piano part at the Hamburg premiere), let his attraction to the Romantic tradition shine forth most clearly. It also displayed his inclination, even then, to lengthen and expand thematic content until it attained almost orchestral proportions, an accomplishment that had already caused Schumann to refer to Brahms's piano sonatas as "veiled symphonies." Though all four movements are masterpieces of composition, the real attraction - perhaps because it is so atypical of Brahms - is the final movement marked Rondo alla Zingarese, the celebrated "Gypsy Rondo." Brahms, as pianist, had toured in 1853 with the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi, and it was from him that the composer acquired his love of that country's music, an attraction that would lead in 1869 to the composition of the Hungarian Dances. After having heard the quartet, the virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim complimented Brahms on his fidelity to his Hungarian sources. At Friday's recital, the quartet was given a bravura performance by Philip Zuckerman, violin; Jasper Snow, viola; Edvard Pogossian, cello; and Tomer Gewirtzman, piano.
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