Juilliard's semester-end chamber music recitals concluded this past Sunday afternoon. I chose to attend the 1:00 p.m. performance and was quite pleased to find that the program featured well known works by Beethoven and Schubert. There was a bit of drama before things began, though, when the lead-off musicians could not be located. But no one in the audience seemed to mind waiting a few minutes - everyone realizes how busy Juilliard students are - and the recital, once the errant players had been located, started only fifteen minutes behind schedule.
The program opened with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47 (1803), nicknamed the "Kreutzer Sonata" after the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Kreutzer. however, was not the original dedicatee. That honor had first been given to George Bridgetower, the violinist who had performed the sonata at its premiere with Beethoven himself playing the pianoforte part. Bridgetower must have been quite a competent musician. Without benefit of any rehearsal, according to Ferdinand Ries whom Beethoven summoned at 4:30 a.m. to copy the work, he was able to sight read his part while looking over Beethoven's shoulder at the composer's own copy of the score and even under those circumstances was able to make a correction Beethoven accepted, gleefully exclaiming "Noch einmal, mein lieber Bursch!" ("Once again, my dear boy!"). Unfortunately, the two decided to celebrate after the performance ended and went out together for drinks. Since for some unknown reason the concert had begun at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m., it may have been a bad idea to start making the rounds of the bars so early in the day. While the two friends were downing their liquor, Bridgetower began making unflattering remarks concerning the questionable virtue of a woman of his acquaintance. The woman turned out to be friend of Beethoven who was not at all happy to hear her treated so shabbily. He removed Bridgetower's name as dedicatee when the sonata was published and gave the honor instead to Kreutzer whom he had met only once and then briefly. In a further twist, Kreutzer, not pleased at being second in line, declared the work "outrageously unintelligible" and never performed it. Beethoven seems not to have had any luck with his dedications. One need only remember what happened the following year when his plan to dedicate his Third Symphony, the "Eroica," to Napoleon went fatefully awry.
More important than the dedication, though, was the music itself. It was written at the inception of Beethoven's middle period but already shows a clear break from the Classical Haydnesque works that had preceded it. It is much grander in scope than the composer's prior eight sonatas for violin, a point Beethoven emphasized by including in the title the phrase “almost in the manner of a concerto.” The first movement starts off with a few slow chords that sound so awkward that the listener wonders if the violinist is perhaps experiencing difficulty at the very beginning of the piece. From there, the violin and piano move from key to key as though Beethoven were experimenting with the relationships among them in search of a particular combination. The second movement andante is based on a theme and variations, a technique Beethoven had practiced from his earliest days as a pianist, sometimes improvising variations on popular tunes whose names the audiences called out to him during recitals. What is unusual here is the complexity of the theme itself. Normally the composer would keep this fairly simple if for no other reason than to allow himself the widest latitude in creating the variations upon it. But this theme is complex and demanding and the variations derived from it all the more masterful. The third movement, a tarantella, was originally written for an earlier sonata, the Op. 30, No. 1. Beethoven had been in such haste to perform with Bridgetower that he hadn't time to write a new ending but simply used what was at hand. The movement is much more lighthearted than the first two and seems somewhat mismatched.
The performers were Yuanmiao Li, violin, and Re Zhang, piano; the coaches were Ronald Copes and Jerome Lowenthal.
The second and final work on the program was Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, D. 898 (1827). The composer's two piano trios, written shortly before his death, are rightfully considered masterpieces of the genre and are among his greatest chamber compositions. He had written an earlier trio, also in B-flat major, the D. 28, while still a student of Salieri and then for reasons unknown had abandoned the form. It was not until he had become friends with the Czech pianist Karl Maria von Bocklet who was capable of playing on the same level as violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and cellist Josef Linke that Schubert was inspired to return to the genre. While the models he had to work from, including those of Beethoven, were in the Classical style, Schubert more or less reinvented the trio as a vehicle for pure Romanticism. The D. 898 is literally filled with melody right from the beginning of the opening movement that is so effervescent it reminds one in this regard of the "Trout" quintet. And the second movement andante un poco mosso is among the loveliest Schubert ever composed.
The ensemble, coached by Jerome Lowenthal, consisted of Chener Yuan, violin; Yifei Li, cello; and Jiaxin Min, piano.
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