On Saturday afternoon I attended the last of the Juilliard Chamberfest performances I'd be hearing this season. The list of featured composers - Schoenberg, Beethoven and Dvořák - was once again eclectic and allowed me to hear chamber works from three very different periods.
The program opened with Schoenberg's Suite Für Kleine Klarinette, Klarinette, Bassklarinette, Geige, Bratche, Violincello und Klavier, Op. 29 (1925-26). The small ensemble that performed this piece for piano, strings and winds consisted of Seo Hee Min, violin, Hayaka Komatsu, viola, Issei Herr, cello, Sunho Song, E-flat clarinet, Dan Giocobbe, B-flat clarinet, Moran Katz, bass clarinet, and Christopher Staknys, piano; they were coached by Charles Neidich, who also conducted, and Fred Sherry. Even though the second movement of this piece was originally conceived (tongue firmly in cheek) as a foxtrot, no composer is less likely to be associated in one's mind with big band music than Schoenberg. Certainly, no one could describe this music as "toe tapping." This was, in fact, one of the composer's earliest experiments with the twelve-tone system and in its references to dance a successor to his previous suite, the Op. 25 for solo piano, in which each movement had been based on a Baroque dance form. In this piece too the final movement is marked as a gigue. If the composer was in a joking mood when he wrote the work it may have been because he had recently married for the second time (after the death of his first wife Mathilde, Zemlinsky's sister, who had embroiled him in scandal when she had run off with the painter Richard Gerstl) and was finally beginning to receive some modest recognition as a composer after years of repudiation. This took concrete form when he was appointed to the faculty of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1925.
The next piece was Beethoven's String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 95 (1810). It was performed by four pre-College students - Clara Neubauer and Oliver Neubauer, violins, Juliet Duguid, viola, and Charlotte Whatley, cello - who were coached by Sean Lee and Catherine Cho. Beethoven rarely supplied his works with titles. Those that have come down to us were usually added by publishers hoping to increase sales with catchy nicknames. The Op. 95 is an exception in the the composer clearly marked the score Quartett Serioso and then, as if to underline the point, added the term serioso to the markings for the third movement. And if that were not enough, Beethoven later wrote to the British composer George Smart the following cryptic admonition: "The Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public." Why such uncharacteristic concern on the composer's part? Most likely it was because Beethoven was here anticipating the great works of his late period. In fact, there is some question whether the Op. 95 should rightfully be included as one of the late quartets so radical were the techniques Beethoven was here employing for the first time. It goes without saying that this is a highly complex piece of music whose performance would pose a challenge to even the most experienced ensembles. That it should be attempted by pre-college students and then carried off so successfully, even if slightly lacking in polish, is a testament to the talent and dedication of those attending Juilliard and to the quality of the education the school provides.
After intermission, the program concluded with Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81 (1887). The musicians on this last piece were Kako Miura and Natsuko Takashima, violins, Stephanie Block, viola, Matthew Chen, cello, and Anna Han, piano; their coaches were Joseph Kalichstein and Daniel Phillips. There are relatively few major piano quintets in the nineteenth century chamber repertoire. The form more or less came into being with Schumann's Op. 44 that I had heard performed earlier in the week. Later in the century, both Dvorak and Brahms tried their hands at it. The present work was initially conceived as a revision of a youthful work, the Op. 5, for the same instrumentation and in the same key. I have a superlative recording of both quintets performed by Sviatoslav Richter and the Borodin Quartet that shows quite clearly when played side by side the distance traveled by Dvořák as his talent matured. The most moving part of the later work is the second movement Dumka in which the composer displayed his mastery of folk sources. The performance of this work was particularly fine, one of the best given among the Chamberfest recitals I attended.
One of the advantages of Chamberfest is that the programming often allows works in the same genre to be played in close proximity to one another, thus allowing the non-musician to better understand the different ways in which composers approached the same problem. This season, I had a chance to hear all three of the major nineteenth century piano quintets performed virtually side by side. I found the differences among the Schumann, Brahms and Dvořák quintets to be greater than the similarities they shared. Each composer was a genius in his own right and stamped his oeuvre with the force of his personality no matter what the traditions of the times in which he lived. Hearing the manner in which each came to grips with a genre in which the sound of the piano had to be carefully integrated with that of the strings was extremely rewarding.
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