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First Metropolitan United Church
June 3, 2012
If you wished to have a single melody engraved on your tombstone, you might do a great deal worse (and hardly any better) than violinist Joseph Saunders, who had the second subject of the opening movement of Schubert's last chamber work, the quintet in C, D.956, carved upon his.
The appearance of that gorgeous melody on the two cellos may be the most obviously memorable moment in the quintet, but its wonderfully relaxed sensuousness is hardly the defining mood of the work, which shows clearly that Schubert was aware that his own days were numbered.
Sunday's opening concert of the 2012 Eine Kleine Summer Music season - incidentally, is it the twenty-fifth season or the twenty-fifth anniversary? - was comprised of two large scale works ("second half works", as violinist Terence Tam put it in his introduction) and the Schubert naturally took pride of place - it is, after all, acknowledged as one of the supreme chamber works in the literature.
Tam, Julian Vitek, Kay Cochran, Laura Backstrom and Paula Kiffner gave a wonderfully assured and perceptive account of the quintet - all the more impressive as they are not a regular ensemble.
The first movement lacked its exposition repeat but given the length of the programme - and the quality of the playing - this was entirely forgivable.
The slow movement is surely the heart of the quintet; Sunday's performance was quite beautiful, with lovely inner voices supporting the duet between the soaring first violin and the second cello's pizzicato.
The exuberant scherzo was full of energy, its contrasting trio a sudden, sobering reminder that "in the midst of life, we are in death".
Many writers have expressed puzzlement over the finale's apparent extroversion, which they see as a contradiction after what has preceded it. I prefer to see it as Schubert's raging "against the dying of the light" and Sunday's performance, with its determined opening, the precision of its dynamics and some pregnant pauses, certainly seemed to support this hypothesis.
A very fine performance indeed.
In the title of her 1959 novel, Françoise Sagan posed the question "Aimez-vous Brahms?"
It is a question I should have a difficult time answering; oddly, and I have never been able to explain it adequately, Brahms is a composer whose music rarely thrills me in prospect, yet, the actuality (with a few notable exceptions) never fails to satisfy. This probably qualifies less as love, more as respectful admiration.
The String Sextet No.1 is an early work and full of the enthusiasms of youth. It is also a "big" work - not just in length, but with big, almost orchestral, sonorities, so much so that it seems almost perverse that nobody, insofar as I am aware, has ever arranged it for a larger ensemble. (Mind you, if you want perverse, then look no further than Frederick Stock's arrangement - for full orchestra, mind, not just strings - of the Schubert quintet. The man must have had a screw or two loose. And yes, it is just as deranged as it sounds - trust me, I've listened to it so that you don't have to.)
The half of Sunday's programme was devoted to the Brahms sextet, in a performance which, with its rich, resonant tones, underlined the quasi-orchestral nature of the music.
Tempos throughout were excellently judged, ensemble was first-rate and my only slight reservation was that the second movement, with its worthy rather than inspired theme, seemed, until the final variation, a little hard-driven.
This is not, it must be admitted, profound music - especially when compared with the Schubert, one of music's most profound utterances - but it is most enjoyable. I particularly liked the finale, with its sense of "winding down" after the first three movements; it is a rondo in which each episode seems more mild-mannered than the previous and was quite delightful, although I suspect that an older, wiser Brahms might well have dispensed with the final accelerando.
After a quarter of a century, Eine Kleine Summer Music shows no sign of relaxing its always high standards.
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