On Friday evening I heard at Paul Hall my third Chamberfest performance of the week. This time the program included two lesser known works by Anton Arensky and John Harbison as well as one of Brahms's best known chamber pieces.
The recital opened with Arensky's String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 35 (1894). The musicians were Ashley J. Park, violin, Emily Liu, viola, and Sarina Zhang and Chloe Hong, cellos; their coach was Darrett Adkins. A student of Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky is best remembered today for his position as educator at the Moscow Conservatory where he was the teacher of both Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. Tchaikovsky had also been on the Conservatory's faculty and was greatly admired by Arensky, so it was only natural that shortly after Tchaikovsky's death Arensky should eulogize him in a deeply felt chamber piece. The quartet eventually became Arensky's best known work, primarily for the second movement variations based on a theme taken from Tchaikovsky's Op. 54, Sixteen Songs for Children. The mournful tribute was greatly enhanced by the unusual instrumentation; the removal of one violin and the doubling of the cellos imbued the piece with a dark character rooted in the Russian folk tradition. As for Arensky himself, like a character from a Dostoevsky novel, he died at only age 44, the victim of consumption and alcoholism.
The next work was Harbison's Twilight Music for horn, violin, and piano (1985). This work was completely unfamiliar to me as, for that matter, is almost all of Harbison's music. I only knew the composer's name because he had in 1999 written the opera based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, The horn trio instrumentation immediately calls to mind the works by Brahms and Ligeti though there is no indication that Harbison intended the work as a tribute to either composer. Although the title would suggest the work is something of a nocturne, that isn't evident at all, except perhaps in the final movement. Rather, for most of its length it sounded static although I was impressed by the balance Harbison achieved between horn and violin. The trio was performed by Zhi Ma, violin, Thea Humphries, horn, Chenchun Ma, piano, and was coached by Eric Reed and John Harbison himself. Before beginning, the hornist, in briefly introducing the work, mentioned that it was in one movement but consisted of four sections, the most crucial of which was an inner section that described a tableau in which the poet Hölderin was seated before a book of his poems.
After intermission, the program concluded with Brahms's Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 (1864) as performed by Brendon Elliott and Xiaoxuan Shi, violins, Jiawei Yan, viola, Tomsen Su, cello, Wenting Shi, piano, and coached by Joseph Kalichstein and Sylvia Rosenberg. It was this last piece by Brahms that provided my reason for having chosen to attend this particular recital. After having heard Schumann's Piano Quintet performed on Wednesday I was interested to hear how Brahms approached the same instrumentation. Actually, though, the work seems to have attained its final form through default after having exhausted other possibilities. It began as a string quintet (for two cellos rather than two violas) and Brahms must have had substantial reservations about it in this form since he later destroyed the score. Probably the following criticism he received from Joseph Joachim, on whose advice he relied heavily when writing for strings, only confirmed his own misgivings:
"I do not wish to dogmatize on the details of a work which in every line shows some proof of overpowering strength. But what is lacking is, in a word, charm. After a time, on hearing the work quietly, I think you will feel the same as I do about it."
Nor was the work any more successful in its second incarnation as a sonata for two pianos. Whatever Brahms thought of the piano quintet genre - he never composed another - he must have seen it as the only solution to this particular problem. Even so, the work has undisputed power and an almost symphonic breadth at points, and it may be this very aspiration to orchestral complexity that caused Brahms so many problems in the first place.
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