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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 26, 2008
"Where other people keep diaries in which they record their momentary feelings, etc, Schubert simply kept sheets of music by him and confided his changing moods to them; and his soul being steeped in music, he put down notes when another man would resort to words."
The words are those of Robert Schumann, in a letter to his future father-in-law Friedrich Wieck, dated 1829, the year after Schubert's death.
Saturday night's superb VSMF concert consisted of one early, one middle-period and one late work by Schubert - inasmuch as a composer who died at 31 can be said to have early, middle and late periods.
The Quartet in g minor, D.173 dates from 1815 and it is clear that, almost three decades later, the shadow of Mozart still - for Schubert at any rate - loomed large over that particular tonality. The spirit of the string quintet, K.516 and the symphony, K.550 could be felt in at least three of the quartet's four movements.
The Emily Carr Quartet gave this relatively-infrequently-heard work a most impressive performance, from the dramatic opening chords to the expectant finale, with its sotto voce crescendos providing considerable tension. Throughout the work they were careful not to impute too much profundity in to the music - whose composer was, after all, just eighteen when he wrote it.
The slow movement was the most obviously Schubertian; a theme and variations - what else? - it was quite lovely.
In the trio of the third-movement minuet the mood temporarily lightened as the spirit of Haydn presided over the music, but the overall feel of the work was undoubtedly sombre.
I can think of no higher praise than to say that the performance made me keen to hear this "sturdy little quartet" (as The New Grove puts it) again.
It was just over four years later that a summer walking trip found Schubert in the town of Steyr and the guest of its music-loving mine manager, Sylvester Paumgartner.
The music he produced at Paumgartener's request, the Quintet in A for piano and strings, D.667, the "Trout", remains to this day one of Schubert's most popular works. And deservedly so, as the music is almost unreservedly sunny and tuneful as only Schubert can be.
Saturday's concert closed with a wonderful performance of the "Trout", a work which I have probably reviewed as often as, if not more often than, any other. Tempos were judiciously chosen, with a fine sense of rubato throughout and balances were truly excellent - one could actually hear the notes of Mary Rannie's doublebass, it was not simply a rumbling subterranean presence, as so often.
By any normal musicological measure, the "Trout" is no masterpiece. Such carping (no piscine pun intended) is reduced to irrelevance in the face of a halfway decent performance - and this was so much more than that. If ever there was a work to send its audience smiling into the night, this is it, and this was such a performance.
The latest music on Saturday's programme was the music which opened it: three of the four Impromptus, D.899, probably written in the spring of 1827, less than two years before the composer's demise.
Although Schumann once, rather oddly, remarked that the impromptus were like the movements of a "sonata not assembled", his enthusiasm does not always seemed to have been shared by others: Arthur Hutchings, for instance, in the Master Musicians volume on the composer, describes them as "pleasantly and delicately laid out" although not "particularly noteworthy".
I would venture to disagree and would adduce Arthur Rowe's performance of D.899 Nos.2-4 in evidence.
Rowe is a master pianist, almost certainly under-appreciated in his home town, and in his hands this music sounds more than noteworthy; Schubert's late music is full of the bittersweet feelings of a man all too aware of his own mortality and the impermanence of human life and emotions, and Rowe conveyed this in performances of great freshness, the piano tone a perfectly Schubertian one - bright yet mellow, like dappled sunlight filtered through the leaves of an autumnal forest.
A marvellous evening's music, only slightly marred by the phantom hearing aid wearer's whistling throughout most of the quartet and quintet.
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