On Monday afternoon, I went to hear the Jupiter Players' first chamber music recital of the season at Christ & St. Stephen's Church on West 65th Street. As this was 9/11 and a day of remembrance in New York City, the theme of the recital was Homage. The performance featured works appropriate to the occasion by Lowell Liebermann, Arvo Pärt and Brahms and included no less than two adaptations of the music of J.S. Bach.
The program opened with Liebermann's Fantasy on a Fugue of J. S. Bach (1989) for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano. The work is based on Fugue 24 in B minor from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846-893, Vol. 1 (1722). With the winds playing so prominent a part, the Fantasy has much the character of a serenade and, like a great deal of Liebermann's oeuvre, a definite neo-Romantic flavor. I had only just heard in recital a week earlier the same composer's Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, Op. 28, written the same year as the Fantasy, and it was intriguing to compare how differently Liebermann approached each piece. The Fantasy was a much more restrained work and was at times almost plaintive in character.
The next work was Pärt's Fratres (“Brothers”) (1977). One of Pärt's best known works, Fratres was composed without fixed instrumentation and so exists in any number of arrangements. That with which I'm most familiar is for twelve cellos, but on Monday the piece was performed by violin and piano, one of the earliest and most common versions. The music is minimalist and consists entirely of variations on a simple six-bar theme, but for all that it is a haunting and moving work, one of the earliest triumphs of the composer's tintinnabulist style.
Following the first installment of Pärt's music came Brahms's Chaconne in D minor for left hand piano (1877-1878). The piece is a transcription of the final movement of Bach's Violin Partita No. 2, BWV 1004 (1720). The movement is among Bach's greatest achievements and perhaps the most famous piece for solo violin in Western music. It has been transcribed many times since its first publication in 1820 and there have even been piano accompaniments written for it by both Schumann and Mendelssohn. When it came Brahms's turn, he rhapsodized over Bach's original creation in a letter to Clara Schumann, claiming it to be "a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings." In preparing his transcription, he not surprisingly remained devoutly faithful to the original and strove to recreate as far as possible the sound of the violin itself. He was later criticized for this unswerving allegiance by, among others, Paul Wittgenstein who in his own transcription for the left hand added a true bass line instead of merely setting the piece one octave lower. As Wittgenstein had lost his right hand in combat in World War I, he had no choice but to set the work for the left hand only. Brahms's insistence that his transcription be played with the left hand alone is more difficult to understand and is only partially explained by his comment to Clara:
"There is only one way in which I can secure undiluted joy from this piece, though on a small and only approximate scale, and that is when I play it with the left hand alone."
While Brahms's passion for Bach's music is highly laudable, the Chaconne sounds far better when played on violin, as Bach had intended. The piano transcription, no matter how well played, is heavier and soars not nearly so high. This is not surprising since the piano is after all a percussive instrument. Some notes reverberate uncomfortably at points where there should be only silence..
The first half of the recital concluded with Pärt's Da pacem Domine (“Give peace, O Lord”) (2004-2006). The work, commissioned by Jordi Savall for a peace conference held in Barcelona, takes as its text a Gregorian chant, a form of medieval plainsong, and was originally written for four-part choir or for four soloists singing a cappella while at this recital it was performed by string quartet. The liturgical quality inherent in Pärt's tintinnabulist style imparts to his music a distinctively mystical "new age" sound, and I think that it is this that accounts for a large part of his current popularity.
After intermission, the program concluded with Brahms's String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 18 (1860). Brahms composed his two string sextets only a few years apart - the No. 2 in G major, Op. 36 was completed in 1864 - but what's curious is that both came long before his first Op. 51 string quartets in 1873. One would think that writing for four parts would be much easier than for six and that the quartets should therefore have logically preceded the sextets. One clue to this unusual chronology may lie in both forms' antecedents. Before Brahms completed the Op. 18, the nineteenth century repertoire contained almost no examples of this instrumentation other than Louis Spohr's Op. 140 in C major composed some twelve years earlier. On the other hand, the string quartet was already a venerable tradition by the time Brahms first came to the genre. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had all composed quartets that ranked among their finest creations. One can take it as a certainty that Brahms, who famously claimed to have heard the footsteps of Beethoven behind him when writing his First Symphony, was more than a little intimidated by the magnificence of these masterpieces. In fact, Brahms is thought to have destroyed some twenty previous attempts before allowing the two Op. 51 quartets to be published. He faced no such problems, however, with the sextets whose textures are actually much closer to the divertimenti of the Classical period than to the formal structures already established for the quartet genre. Even if a bit derivative - witness the debt to Beethoven in the third movement and to Schubert in the fourth - the Op. 18 is still an important early work by a major composer.
This was one of the Jupiter ensemble's more successful programs. It moved easily between the present day and the Romantic period with a nod to the Baroque era along the way.
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