MiV Home
St. Mary's Anglican Church
May 12, 2012
The notion of contrast is central to much music: the contrast between loud and soft, between fast and slow, between high and low, between different instruments.
The notion of contrast in concert programming, on the other hand, seems to have almost died out in the course of the last century. Today concert programmes are almost entirely serious, or almost entirely un-serious (in which case they are frequently called "Pops" concerts). Yet this was not always the case: consider, for example, the Promenade Concert of August 4, 1895 (the first-ever season): here we find Schubert's "Unfinished" and a handful of Wagner overture nestling, cheek-by-jowl, with J. Valentine Hall's "Sally in our Alley" and Frederic Cowen's "It was a Dream", inter alia.
The approach to programming by the DieMahler String Quartet is, therefore, both old and new.
Saturday afternoon's concert, the final in their 2012 Chamber Music Series, was, even more than unusual, in two distinct halves: the first consisting of shorter, (mainly) lighter music; the second, of a single acknowledged masterpiece.
"I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today - it is a knockout! Now for a finale." Samuel Barber was writing in September 1936 to his friend Orlando Cole, a member of the Curtis String Quartet. That "knockout" slow movement is far more frequently heard these days in its string orchestra guise, as the Adagio for Strings.
It also tends to be played very slowly.
The DieMahlers opened their programme with a smoothly flowing account of the movement, taken at a relatively swift tempo and thereby shorn of the overblown and portentous character which many conductors - and, it must be admitted, some string quartets - seem to feel is an essential quality of the music (it is not).
The performance may have seemed a little old-fashioned in some ways, but I prefer to call it "authentic" - the music is, after all, three-quarters of a century old and performance practises have definitely changed in that time.
This was most impressive.
The remainder of the concert's opening half was somewhat less weighty and full of memorable melody.
Three rags by Scott Joplin featured some nice rubato and even portamento from the violins, although in these pieces - and only these - the group's intonation occasionally wandered from the straight-and-narrow. The final piece, Maple Leaf Rag, to my ears, hinted at what might have been a few decades after Joplin actually wrote this most famous of all piano rags. Or, as I put it in my notebook, this performance seemed to feature "a touch of the Stephan Grapellis".
Leonard Bernstein's music to West Side Story has always lent itself to arrangements - although I hope never to hear another like the English rock group, The Nice, who took America's 6/8 tempo (the divisions into 2+2+2 and 3+3 giving the songs its essential characteristic) and shoehorned it into an mind-numbingly enervating 4/4. However, I must confess, I have never heard a string quartet version before.
But I should welcome the chance to hear one again, especially when played with the panâche, or perhaps I mean pizazz, that these four brought to "America", "Cool" (loved those finger snaps!), "Maria" (with the melody gorgeously played by violist Elizabeth Massi), "I Feel Pretty" and "There's a Place".
I do not know whether it is in any way significant, but each of the three "popular" composers featured also wrote at least one opera. Admittedly Joplin's Treemonisha is hardly well-known and had to wait until the 1970s for a recording; and Bernstein's musicals tend to be rather better-known than his operas (Trouble in Tahiti, anyone?).
But everybody has heard of (and can probably hum significant chunks of) Porgy and Bess, and it was with some Gershwin - admittedly the somewhat less-known "Sweet and Low-Down" that the "lighter" half of the programme closed. The performance itself could be described (in my cod-Italian) as "molto energico e molto syncopatico". Indeed.
Antonin Dvořák was surely one of he most naturally-gifted melodists in musical history - incidentally, his first name was not, despite an apparently recent trend, "Anton" (his friends may have referred to him thus; equally, they might have called him "Ant", we simply do not know). His String Quartet Op.96, known as the "American" and composed during a visit to Spillville, Iowa, displays this talent to perfection and is one of the composer's most popular works.
Although more "serious" than the shorter works - not least because of its greater length - the "American" is scarcely profound music, although it is, in the right hands, a profoundly enjoyable and satisfying experience.
And these were undoubtedly the right hands, as the quartet (shorn of repeats, perchance?) seemed to fly by. A few highlights included some marvellously spirited playing in the opening movement, especially Massi's exposition of that inimitably Dvořákian melody, and delectable paired violins and a noble cello in the second. The scherzo, taken at an excellent tempo, was delightful and the finale fairly bounced along, although one might quibble and suggest that their vivace was perhaps just a tad troppo.
For an encore, we had a speedy (although, by the side of the composer's own piano rolls, still fairly sedate) account of Joplin's most popular (well, since the 1974 movie, The Sting) rag, The Entertainer.
As enjoyable a way to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon as I know.
MiV Home