On Friday evening the Orion Quartet performed at Mannes's Tisch Auditorium a recital that featured works by the classical composers Beethoven and Haydn as well as a mid-twentieth century work by Leon Kirchner.
The program opened with Beethoven's String Quartet No.11 in F minor, Op. 95 (1810). This was the only quartet to which the composer gave a title, and a very apt one at that, having inscribed on the autograph the phrase Quartett Serioso. Although composed in 1810, the piece was not published until 1816, an indication that Beethoven realized fully well the difficulty such a dark and highly personal work would have in finding acceptance among audiences of his time. In fact, in a letter to George Smart, the conductor who had led the London performances of Beethoven's symphonies, he instructed:
"The Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public."
At the time the quartet was composed Beethoven had once again fallen into one of his periodic moods of despair, in this instance occasioned by the failure of his relationship with the "Immortal Beloved." Just as in 1802, when he had written the Heiligenstadt Testament, he now again considered suicide, going so far as to state:
"If I had not read somewhere that no one should quit life voluntarily while he could still do something worthwhile, I would have been dead long ago and certainly by my own hand. Oh, life is so beautiful, but for me it is poisoned forever."
But it was not only the emotional content that made hearing the quartet so problematic. Just as his earlier despondency had given way to the successes of the Middle Period, so this new crisis led to the breakthroughs of the Late Period. In a very definite sense the experimentation contained in the Op. 95 - for example, the progression in the third movement from F minor to the tonally distant key of B minor - prefigured the radical innovations of the late quartets.
The next work was Kirchner's Sting Quartet No. 1 (1949). Kirchner, though perhaps not so well known to the general public as he deserves to be, was an icon of twentieth-century music. He studied under Schoenberg at UCLA but never adopted the twelve-tone technique in his own music. Instead, in true American fashion, he developed a style uniquely his own. I am not sufficiently qualified to describe that style and so would do best to quote the composer's own notes on the First Quartet, a piece he admitted was heavily influenced by Bartók's music:
"The first movement of the Quartet, Allegro ma non troppo, is divided into 4 sections. The first section contains 2 expositions of thematic material presented in the opening measures. The second section contrasts this material harmonically, metrically and structurally. The third section is a pre-recapitulation of the modified introductory material and the final section combines the functions of the recapitulation and coda."
Before beginning the piece, first violinist Daniel Phillips spoke briefly of the Orion Quartet's long association with the late composer who actually wrote one of his quartets for them. The ensemble will be performing all four quartets at Lincoln Center in May 2016.
After intermission, the program concluded with a performance of Haydn's String Quartet in G minor, "Rider," Op. 74, No. 3 (1793), nicknamed "the Rider" after the final movement's galloping rhythms. The three Op. 74 quartets, along with the Op. 71, are often referred to as the "Apponyi quartets" after Count Anton Georg Apponyi who paid the composer 100 ducats for the privilege of having them dedicated to him. This was really the piece I'd been most interested in hearing. The Orion Quartet's performances of Haydn's works in this genre are without question the best and most authoritative I've encountered. I've been fortunate enough to have attended a number of the ensemble's recitals at Mannes over the past few seasons and have gained from them a much deeper understanding of the depth of the composer's genius.
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