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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
February 16, 2013
"I am a conservative who was forced to become a revolutionary".
The essential truth of Arnold Schoenberg's self-description is borne out in his String Quartet No.3, which was the longest work in Saturday's final concert surveying the quartet literature of what is often referred to as the Second Viennese School.
Here we can clearly hear Schoenberg's new harmonic language in action, but it is shoehorned into a thoroughly conventional framework: four movements including a theme-and-variations slow movement, an intermezzo (how very Brahmsian!) and a rondo finale.
Perhaps it is this contradictory aspect of much of Schoenberg's mature writing which makes him still such a hard nut to crack. Even when as spectacularly well played as the Lafayette Quartet did on this occasion. And make no mistake, this was beautifully played, as we have come to expect. There were even moments of playfulness - not, perhaps, the first emotion one normally associates with this composer - in the opening movement.
Ultimately, however, for me, as I suspect for a number of others, Schoenberg's importance is to be found in his influence on other composers, not - although there are exceptions - in his own music.
In short, Schoenberg is a composer I can and do admire and respect. But not love.
Anton Webern, on the other hand, I do love, perhaps paradoxically as, for most people, Webern's compressed pointillism has little or nothing to offer.
We know much more of his music now than half a century ago and it was with two of his earlier, unpublished, works that the Lafayettes opened the programme.
The Rondo from 1906 suggests little of what was to come; cast in waltz time it is echt-Viennese, although there are a couple of explosive episodes which hint than Webern is not the provincial schoolmaster he might appear to be.
The Quartet from the previous year almost sounds more "advanced"; it appears to be generated from the opening three-note figure, contains some big dramatic gestures and is at times reminiscent of Schoenberg's Verklärte nacht, although the exquisite close put me in mind of the slow movement of Ravel's quartet.
These two pieces were played with total commitment and sumptuous tone colours. Almost as if the audience were being "softened up" for the Schoenberg to follow.
After the interval we were in the more-than-capable hands of the Molinari String Quartet, who first gave us Webern's published String Quartet, Op.28. After this, although he lived for another seven years, Webern was to complete just four more works.
Although cast in three movements, Webern's quartet lasts for no longer than the opening movement of the Schoenberg. The Molinaris certainly cut to the heart of the music, with a strong sense of pulse in the opening movement, truly misterioso pizzicatos in the second and (naturally) a feeling of the enigmatic in the finale.
There are surely few people, though, who would dispute the notion that the finest of all the Second Viennese School's works for string quartet is the last music that we heard: Alban Berg's Lyric Suite.
And fewer still after the Molinari's performance, which was superbly played with total commitment. From the excitable opening movement to the intense, concentrated bleakness of the finale, they did not put a foot wrong.
A performance fully worthy of the music.
Schoenberg may be, as Pierre Boulez once noted, dead, but his music and that of his pupils (and theirs) will, as long as there are ensembles like the Lafayettes and the Molinaris perpared to devote time and energy to it, live on.
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