On Monday afternoon I went to hear another Jupiter Players performance at Good Shepherd church on West 66th Street. The program, entitled Stars in Prague, featured the works of three composers - Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda, Schumann and Dvořák - all of whom had some association with the city, although in the case of Schumann the connection was very slight indeed.
The recital opened with Kalliwoda's Morceau de Salon, Op. 229 (1859) for clarinet and piano. Kalliwoda (actually Jan Křtitel Václav Kalivoda in the original Czech) is another of those composers whose music the Jupiter Players specialize in performing, that is, works by individuals who were prominent during their own lifetimes and bona fide members of the musical establishment but who after their deaths were immediately consigned to oblivion and their music forgotten. After having listened to the present piece, I don't feel Kalliwoda was done any great injustice. This short work was mildly entertaining but, as the title would indicate, nothing more than salon music. It was written several years after the composer had retired as conductor of the Donaueschingen orchestra whose theater had in any event burned to the ground. If its rendition on Monday had a saving grace, it was ensemble member Vadim Lando's standout performance on clarinet .
The next work was Schumann's Piano Quartet in C minor, WoO 32 (1828). This is not, of course, the composer's famous Quartet in E-flat major but rather a youthful effort written some thirteen years before when Schumann was only 19 years old and had barely begun to learn his trade. At the time of the work's composition Schumann was still studying law in Leipzig and had not yet begun his apprenticeship as an aspiring concert pianist under thet tutelage of Friedrich Wieck, his future father-in-law. As such, this slight work is of only historical interest. The most interesting revelation to be gleaned from it is that Schumann was no prodigy. While the work possesses some slight charms - Schumann was later to use one of its themes in his Op. 4 Intermezzi - it fails to give any indication of the great works that were to come. If I were asked to describe the quartet in one word, it would be "overwrought." Considering how young Schumann was at the time he composed it, that's not especailly surprising.
After intermission, the program concluded with the work I had really come to hear, Dvořák's String Sextet in A major, Op. 48 (1878) for two violins, two violas and two cellos. The work was written relatively early in Dvořák's career, only a few years after he had first come to prominence by winning the Austrian Prize (in a competition that had been judged by both Eduard Hanslick and Brahms himself) and in the same year as his breakthrough success with the Slavonic Dances. The fact that Joseph Joachim was among the musicians who played the sextet at its Berlin premiere - this was Dvořák's first major work to be premiered outside Bohemia - was one sign that the composer had at last arrived. Another indication of Dvořák's increasing confidence in his abilities can be found in the emphasis he now placed on traditional Czech folk music, especially in the use of the dumka in the second movement, in place of the German works that had hitherto served as his models. This is reinforced by the reference to the Slavonic Dances in the third movement trio and again in the third variation in the fourth movement.
As always, the musicianship at this recital was beyond reproach. I had previously heard guest artists Elizaveta Kopelman, piano, and Mikhail Kopelman, violin, perform with this same company and been greatly impressed by their virtuosity.
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