Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Juilliard Chamber Music: Schumann, Ligeti and Schubert

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in NYC, and there weren't many people at all at the 1:00 p.m. chamber music recital I attended at Morse Hall.  Those who were there heard an interesting program that featured the work of Schumann, Ligeti and Schubert.

The program opened with Schumann's Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor, WoO 2 [27] (1853) as performed by Hikaru Yonezaki, violin, and Wei Lin Chang, piano; and coached by Vivian Weilerstein and Earl Carlyss.  Before having attended Sunday's performance I had been under the impression that Schumann had composed only two violin sonatas (the Op. 105 in A minor and the Op. 121 in D minor).  When I did some research afterwards I found that the No. 3 had a fairly complicated history.  It seems that shortly after Schumann had met Brahms, the two were joined at the Schumanns' home in Düsseldorf by Albert Dietrich, one of Schumann's students, in anticipation of a visit by the famed violinist Joseph Joachim.  While awaiting Joachim's arrival, Schumann suggested that the three jointly compose a violin sonata.that Joachim could perform during his visit.  Accordingly, Dietrich was assigned the first movement, Brahms the third, while Schumann himself composed the second and fourth movements.  The resulting collaboration came to be known as the F.A.E. Sonata after Joachim's motto Frei aber einsam ("free but lonely").  Joachim did indeed play the sonata at the Schumann's home on October 28, 1853 with Clara providing accompaniment on piano, but the work was not published until 1935.  Immediately after the impromptu performance, Schumann rewrote the movements that had been composed by Brahms and Dietrich so that all four movements in the newly constituted Violin Sonata No. 3 were original compositions by Schumann himself.  Although both Brahms and Clara initially admired the new sonata, Clara later came to associate its composition with the madness that shortly thereafter afflicted her husband and did her best to destroy whatever copies of the manuscript she could locate.  As a result, the Sonata No. 3 was not published until 1956, over a hundred years after its composition.  (Unaccountably, it is identified as WoO 2 on some recordings and as WoO 27 on others.)  Having heard this rarely performed piece, I have to think Clara was mistaken in her misgivings.  It's actually a highly accomplished work of chamber music and there is nothing that I heard in it to indicate any incipient madness on the part of its composer.

The next work was Ligeti's Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet (1956).  The work is an adaptation of an earlier set of eleven bagatelles for solo piano.  In the original work, the bagatelles formed a series marked by ascending stages of complexity.  In the first, only one note was used with a second appearing at the very end; in the second the two notes from the first bagatelle were used with a third appearing at the end; and so on until all twelve notes of the chromatic scale were made use of in the final bagatelle.  The six bagatelles in the quintet are all short pieces, but even in so early and brief a work Ligeti's distinctive style is immediately apparent.  The fifth, an adagio mesto, is a tribute to Béla Bartók while the sixth, molto vivace capriccioso, whose performance was proscribed by the Soviets as being too "dangerous," is marked in the score to be performed "as though insane."  The musicians were Olivia Staton, flute; Lauren Williams, oboe; Andrew O'Donnell, clarinet; Roy Femenella, horn; and Harrison Miller, bassoon.  Their coach was Erik Ralske.

After intermission, the program concluded with Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D 810 (1824), nicknamed "Death and the Maiden" after the composer's lied Der Tod und das Mädchen which provides the theme of the second movement.  Although written some four years before the composer's untimely passing, the quartet - perhaps because at the time he wrote it Schubert was experiencing an outbreak of the syphilis that was eventually to kill him - is filled with foreboding.  This is one of the most literally haunting works in the repertoire and the presence of death can be felt in every note.  In fact, this is true to such an extent that some musicologists classify the work as programmatic rather than absolute music.  It might be for this very reason that the piece went unappreciated during Schubert's lifetime and was only published in 1831, three years after his death.  It contains some of Schubert's darkest music, but I'm not sure that at the time he wrote it he realized his own death was so imminent.  More likely it was an expression of the depression he was then experiencing in which his lack of success as a composer was just as much a factor as his health.  Regardless, it is the very grimness of the music that makes it so compelling.  One is reminded in the final movement's tarantella of Bergman's classic film The Seventh Seal in whose stark closing scene the figure of Death leads the characters in a final dance.  The performers, coached by Darrett Adkins, were Ashley Park and Angela Kim, violins; Emily Liu, viola; and Chloe Joo Yeon Hong, cello.

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