MiV Home
Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 24, 2009
On the list of great composers one would happily spend a social evening with, Joseph Haydn and Felix Mendelssohn must rate pretty high (be honest, can you really imagine taking Mozart or Beethoven to your favourite restaurant?).
Although the popular image of the composer as a tortured genius starving in an attic dies hard, Haydn and Mendelssohn - happy, sane, normal family men who just happened to be musical geniuses - provide the perfect counterexamples.
The two also provided the music for the first part of Friday's excellent Victoria Summer Music Festival concert.
For some reason Haydn published the six string quartets he composed for Count Apponyi as two separate opera of three each; quite why he broke with his common practice is something of a mystery.
Friday's concert opened with the Lafayette String Quartet playing Op.74, No.2, the penultimate quartet of the set.
I have waxed lyrical before in these pages (if that is the appropriate turn of phrase for an online review) about the Lafayette's mastery of Haydn - and about my own feelings of the primacy of Haydn in the quartet repertoire.
Suffice it to say that I was in no way disappointed by Friday's account. There were, it must be admitted, one or two patches of edgy intonation early on, but this I put down to the instruments' still acclimatising in the hall on such a warm day - I mention this only because it is so unusual.
Far more germanely, the Lafayettes once again displayed a superb balance between tension and relaxation: the first movement, for example, opens with a fast, rather than slow, introduction and this was bold and assertive, without being in the least bit aggressive.
The remarkable slow movement, in which all four instruments shine individually, is a theme and variations in which the variations are more in the form of increasingly decorative accompaniments rather than dramatic manipulations of the theme itself. It would be hard to imagine a finer performance.
After a smiling minuet, the energetic finale tripped lightly to its conclusion.
Karl Geiringer once wrote that "the dawn of Romanticism is noticeable in the string quartets of Op.74"; the dawn, indeed, not the bright light of midday. Thankfully the Lafayette Quartet are well aware of the difference.
"I am not writing much now: but sometimes...I know that I must write." Thus spake Mendelssohn to writer William S. Rockstro in the spring of 1845; that summer he composed his last chamber work, the String Quintet Op.87.
Yariv Aloni joined the Lafayettes for a spectacular performance of music which really should be heard more frequently.
The opening movement took off like a rocket and never let go (if I may thoroughly mix my metaphors); there are some similarities - particularly in the dominance of the first violin - to the corresponding movement of the Octet, but we should not make too much of this. Friday's performance had great drive and energy.
The lilting andante scherzando featured some delectable passing of phrases between the players; the heartfelt adagio e lento (an unusual tempo indication) was quite lovely and the finale fairly fizzed along to its energetic close.
The concert's second part was taken up with a very fine performance of Schumann's Piano Quintet, in which Arthur Rowe joined the Lafayettes.
Interestingly enough, Mendelssohn also had a hand in the final form of this work. Clara Schumann was naturally scheduled to be the pianist in the work's premiere, on December 6, 1842, but fell ill on the very day of the performance.
Mendelssohn filled in - sight-reading the piano part - but felt that the second trio in the scherzo was somewhat lacking. At his urging Schumann wrote a rather livelier replacement.
I will admit, here and now, that I am not an unalloyed admirer of Schumann's music; while there are (for me) some wonderful moments in the quintet, there are also passages which seem altogether less so - much of the rambling finale, for example.
Any lack of enjoyment I felt for Friday's performance, then, is due to my reaction to the music and not to the playing, which was uniformly excellent. Balances - long a point of contention in this work - were all but impeccable and there were many marvellous individual touches.
I especially admired the delicious unfolding, on cello and then viola, of the first movement's second subject; the feline grace of the second movement; the energy of the scherzo (my notebook contains the neologism "exuberantissimo!"), with its trio in the Haydn/Brahms gypsy style; and the beautifully coordinated rubato at the opening of the finale, even though its two fugato sections never fail to surprise - if not actually impress.
The Victoria Summer Music Festival's motto has always been "Chamber Music of the Highest Order..."; a finer example than Friday's concert would be hard to find.
MiV Home