This week's Wednesday at One performance at Alice Tully was a one-hour recital that showcased two Juilliard chamber ensembles in a program devoted to the music of Mozart and Janáček.
The program opened with Mozart's Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478 (1785). We in the twenty-first century have put Mozart on so high a pedestal that we often forget he was a working musician who very much needed to earn a living in order to pay his rent and support his family. As such, he faced the same dilemma that still confronts artists today. Should he use (or rather misuse) his talent to pander to popular taste and turn out pieces that would be commercially successful even if not particularly original, or should he instead follow his genius and produce the highest level works of which he was capable even if these proved less profitable? Over and over Mozart took the high road. He ceased giving his once remunerative series of subscription concerts when he could no longer attract audiences. The problem here was that his music had simply become too radical for Viennese audiences to easily follow. The K. 478 was another case in point. Approached by his publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister to compose three piano quartets, then still a relatively new genre, Mozart could have played safe and turned out variations on the traditional trio form, a very basic arrangement in which the strings invariably served in a supporting role to the keyboard. Instead Mozart not only created a work in which the individual string parts were fully realized but one that also required the highest level of virtuosity on the part of the pianist. Audiences, however, were distinctly underwhelmed. As a later 1788 review in Weimar's Journal des Luxus und der Moden put it:
"As performed by amateurs, it [the Quartet] could not please: everybody yawned with boredom with the incomprehensible tintamarre of four instruments which could not keep together and whose senseless concentus never allowed any unity of feeling."
This was a piece that could never be mastered by the bulk of Hoffmeister's customers as the canny publisher immediately realized. When he rebuked Mozart over this and threatened to cancel the balance of the commission, though, the composer is reported to have replied, "Then I will write nothing more, and go hungry, or may the Devil take me." One has to admire his integrity.
Even today performance of this dark G minor work is problematic for any but the greatest musicians. I was lucky enough early last year to have heard the late Seymour Lipkin (with Miriam Fried on violin) give a wonderful performance that brought out the greatness of the music and helped me better appreciate it. If not yet at that high level of musicianship, Wednesday's rendition by the Zelda Piano Quartet - consisting of Philip Zuckerman, violin; Jasper Snow, viola; Edvard Pogossian, cello; and Tomer Gewirtzman, piano - was still quite acceptable, even if at times a bit too strident for my taste in the outer movements, and displayed a great deal of talent. I enjoyed it very much.
The second and final work on the program was Janáček's String Quartet No. 1 (1923), nicknamed the "Kreutzer Sonata." Unusual though it is for a string quartet to have programmatic content, Janáček's work was derived from Tolstoy's eponymous short story which in turn was inspired by Beethoven's famous Violin Sonata No. 9. Tolstoy's story, in which the protagonist murders the wife he suspects of adultery, is a dark and cynical take on Western attitudes towards marriage. sexuality and the rights of women. Janáček's piece mirrors the protagonist's agitated state of mind through rapid shifts in tempo and the use of such devices as tremelo and pizzicato. The work references Beethoven's sonata by quoting the second theme of the first movement in the quartet's third movement but in a minor rather than major key. This is set out in a canon played by the first violin and cello only to be interrupted by dissonant outbursts from the viola and second violin that remind the listener of similar strategies Bartok made us of in his own quartets. The piece was performed by the Cavatina Quartet whose members are Mariella Haubs and Randall Goosby, violins; Jameel Martin, viola; and Yi Qun Xu, cello.
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