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First Unitarian Church
June 8, 2008
The combination of piano and string quartet seems, with hindsight, an obvious one. Yet it was not until 1842 that the first piano quintet was composed, by Robert Schumann. (Schubert's "Trout" is for the more unusual combination of piano, violin, viola, cello and double bass).
Schumann's quintet - few composers have written more than one, Dvorák and Fauré being exceptions - was composed in 1842, his "chamber music year" which also produced a piano trio, a piano quartet and three string quartets. It is an (almost) unqualified masterpiece.
Sunday's second concert in this year's Eine Kleine Summer Music series concluded with a superb performance of the quintet; balances were exceptionally good - something which is emphatically not always the case - and the music's ebb and flow was captured to perfection.
Personally I love the first three movements, but find the finale somewhat less inspired (Liszt was not impressed either, but then he felt that way about the entire quintet); perhaps it was Schumann's indulging in some fugal writing: somehow the mere idea of a Schumann fugue is almost an affront to the sensibilities. Nonetheless, Sunday's performance was at the same exalted level throughout, making as good a case for the finale as I have heard. (I'm afraid it still did not convince this listener.)
The earliest works for string quartet plus one were probably the quintets of Mozart - which added a second viola - and led to a rash of such works, including Boccherini's one hundred and some quintets with second cello.
But the combination of a very different instrument with the quartet provides a potentially more diverse set of potential sonorities; once again Mozart took the lead with his clarinet quintet.
In the same way the Mozart was inspired by the playing of Anton Stadler, so numerous composers in the first half of the twentieth century wrote music specifically for the oboist Leon Goossens.
One such was Sir Arnold Bax, whose 1922 oboe quintet brought the first half of Sunday's concert to a close.
Although born in Streatham, now in South London, Bax was an avowed and devoted admirer of Irish culture and this suffuses the music - even though, at times, the wistful and sinuous oboe lines reminded me more of the kind of cod-Orientalism numerous British composers occasionally produced.
Such minor concerns were swept away by the playing, which was an unalloyed pleasure and which, I suspect, won the composer new admirers.
The afternoon opened with Shostakovich's shortest string quartet, No.7 in f# minor, composed in memory of his first wife.
The opening movement is an enigmatic, sinister dance; the second eerily bleak; the finale opens quietly before launching into a blistering fugue.
Sunday's performance was on the same high level as the rest and it was gratifying that, for a programme in which the unfamiliar outnumbered the familiar two-to-one, the church was packed to overflowing.
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