Jupiter Players Perform Haydn*, Kahn, Schubert and Beethoven

On Monday afternoon I walked down to Good Shepherd Church where I heard the Jupiter Players perform a program of German music that featured the works of Haydn (not really), Robert Kahn, Schubert and Beethoven.

The program opened with Haydn's Flute Quartet in D major, Op. 5, No. 1, Hob. II:D9 (n.d.).  The Hoboken numbering system used here is a tipoff to the listener that this is not an authentic work - the Roman numeral II places it among the divertimenti, and the letter D, the key in which the work is written, is an indication that the work was falsely attributed to Haydn.  Other than in orchestrations of larger works, the composer actually wrote very little music for the flute which only attained its modern form in the mid-nineteenth century through the efforts of Theobald Böhm.  To meet demand, publishers of Haydn's chamber works were not above fixing his name to pieces with which he had had no connection.  The present work was pleasant enough and skillfully composed but unfortunately exhibited none of Haydn's genius.

The next work was Kahn's Quintet in C minor (1911) for violin, clarinet, horn, cello and piano.  Early in life Kahn was befriended by Brahms but was too shy to accept the great composer's offer to make him his pupil.  Instead, he worked as a freelance composer, chamber musician and accompanist in Leipzig and Berlin and was then admitted to the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1916.  When he was almost 70 years old, Kahn was forced to flee Germany in the face of the Nazi takeover and died in obscurity in England seventeen years later.  The quintet performed here was distinguished by the unusual combination of instruments for which it was scored.  Together they gave the work a truly unique sound that was almost symphonic.  It was sometimes difficult for the listener to believe there were only five instruments onstage.

The first half of the program ended with Schubert's Notturno in E-flat major, Op. 148, D. 897 (1827).  This stand alone adagio from the composer's late period is one of his most beautiful creations and is sometimes thought to have been a discarded slow movement from the Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major.  If so, it's difficult to understand why Schubert would have jettisoned it. The slow sustained melody with which it opens also looks ahead to the great Quintet in C major that Schubert would compose the following year.

After intermission the musicians performed Beethoven's String Quintet in C major, Op. 29 (1801), nicknamed "The Storm."  This was one of the last works of the composer's Early Period, written at approximately the same time as the Op. 18 quartets and the First Symphony and only a year before the famous Heilgenstadt Testimony led him into his Middle Period.  The quintet is so rich a work that one wonders why it is not performed more often.  Certainly the enchanting adagio is one of the loveliest the composer ever wrote.  Beethoven's only attempt at the quintet form (not counting two rearrangements), it anticipates, most especially in the first movement, the Razumovsky quartets that would come five years later.  As for the source of its sobriquet, that was derived from the tumultuous presto finale.

I had not been to a Jupiter Players recital in several months and was gratified to learn that they had lost none of their élan.  The guest artists Timur Mustakimov, piano, and Elizabeth Fayette, violin, were both exceptionally talented.