Yesterday evening I went to Juilliard's Paul Hall to hear the most recent installment of the school's annual Chamberfest series, a week-long festival of notable works from the chamber repertoire performed by students and faculty who have given up a week of their holiday break to prepare for the event. This particular performance featured an eclectic mix of works by three prominent composers - Beethoven, Prokofiev and Brahms.
The program opened with Beethoven's Piano Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11 (1797) as performed by Phillip Solomon, clarinet, Emily Mantone, cello, and Anastasia Magamedova, piano, and coached by Jon Manasse. Unlike Beethoven's other piano trios, this piece possessed a unique instrumentation in its choice of a woodwind instrument to accompany the piano and cello. (The composer did, however, publish an alternate arrangement in which a violin replaced the clarinet.) It's difficult for us to imagine now the grim figure of Beethoven ever being in a playful mood, but in his early days in Vienna when he was still trying to establish his popularity as a pianist he often spun out variations on popular tunes, an exercise at which he was extremely adept and could often perform extemporaneously. This is just such a piece if a bit more thoughtful than many of the variations from this period that were published without opus number. The theme here, which appears in the third movement, was based on the aria Pria ch'io l'impegno from the highly successful opera L'amor marinaro ossia Il corsaro written by Joseph Weigl. It was this third movement theme that gave the entire work its nickname of the "Gassenhauer Trio" in reference to a melody so popular that it is often sung or hummed in the streets. The mood of the entire work was relaxed and genial and a far cry from the high drama that would appear only a few years later when the composer entered his middle period.
The next work was Prokofiev's Quintet in G Minor, Op. 39 (1924). The musicians performing this piece were Jonathan Gentry, oboe, Wonchan Doh, clarinet, Ariel Horowitz, violin, Alaina Rea, viola, and Sebastian Zinca, double bass; their coaches were Curtis Macomber and Jon Manasse. This was a rather odd piece, and not only for the unusual instrumentation, and was the result of an ad hoc commission from a choreographer named Boris Romanov with whom Prokofiev had become acquainted while working in Paris with Diaghilev on Chout. Romanov, short of both musicians and dancers, not to mention money, wanted a score for a short ballet he could take with him on tour. Prokofiev came up with music for a dance piece entitled Trapeze, but when the musicians found the work too difficult to play he salvaged what he could from it for the present six-movement quintet. It was a rambunctious work - the finale was marked tumultuoso e precipitato - in which the musicians often appeared to be playing off key and out of harmony with one another. This only made it that much more fun to hear.
After intermission, the program concluded with Brahms's String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111 (1890). The performers on this piece were George Meyer and Byungchan Lee, violins, Meagan Turner and Grace Takeda, violas, and Megan Yip, cello; Ronald Copes was the coach. The work - written for the same instrumentation as Mozart's renowned "viola" quintets - has become famous for its intended role as Brahms's valediction. Even before finishing it, he had written to his friend Eusebius Mandyczewski:
"I’ve been tormenting myself for a long time with all kinds of things, a symphony, chamber music and other stuff, and nothing will come of it. Above all, I was always used to everything being clear to me. It seems to me that it’s not going the way it used to. I’m just not going to do any more."
Similarly, when submitting a revision to the final movement to his publisher Simrock, he appended a message that read: ""With this note you can take leave of my music, because it is high time to stop." But for a work intended as a farewell, the quintet is unusually expansive and upbeat in nature, most especially in its finale. Although the slow movements are somewhat contemplative, there is little trace of the sadness and world weariness one would normally expect to encounter in a leave taking. Nor is it done on a small scale. Many of Brahms's chamber works seem to strain against the limits of the genre and aspire to an almost symphonic breadth and this quintet is no exception. The opening theme of the first movement, in fact, was taken according to some musicologists from that of a planned fifth symphony that never came to fruition. Another point of interest is Brahms's disagreement with the noted violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim on whose advice the composer had always relied when writing for string instruments. In this case, Joachim had spoken out against the cello's opening melody, claiming that it would be impossible to hear the cello over the sound of the other four instruments. Brahms initially wavered, but then decided to follow his initial inspiration and let it be.
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