MiV Home
First Unitarian Church
June 15, 2014
"I am delighted to tell you that Edward's first exclamation was 'It is too lovely for words'".
Thus did Alice Elgar report her husband's reaction on first seeing, in May 1917, "Brinkwells", the Sussex cottage which she had rented for the summer.
In the event, Elgar was to stay at Brinkwells for over three years and, while there, composed his last great works: his three chamber pieces and the cello concerto.
It was with the last of those chamber works, the Piano Quintet Op.85, that Lorraine Min, Terence Tam, Julian Vitek, Kenji Fusé and Laura Backstrom closed Sunday's excellent second concert in this year's Eine Kleine Summer Music Series.
This was a performance which grew in stature as it progressed: despite some genuinely lovely playing, there were passages in the first movement when the music seemed to meander, as if the players had not quite come to grips with its emotional content; the slow second movement was, by contrast, virtually irreproachable in its intensity and the beauty of its final bars.
The finale, with its reminiscences of both earlier movements, may have seemed a little tame at first, yet the deliberate tempo adopted for the main allegro permitted the performance to become more "unbuttoned" as it progressed to the gorgeously volatile coda.
Whether it was deliberate or not I couldn't say, but in the month which saw the centenary of Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand - and, let it not be forgotten, his wife, Sophie - all three items on this programme were, either directly or indirectly, brought in to being by the ensuing "War to end war" (a phrase which originated in a jingoistic newspaper article by H.G. Wells).
It might be thought that Sir Arthur Bliss's Oboe Quintet, composed in 1927, was free of the war's baleful influence, but Bliss - who had enlisted when war was declared, been wounded twice and gassed once and whose younger brother had been killed - never really recovered; as Byron Adams puts it "despite the apparent heartiness and equilibrium of the composer's public persona, the emotional wounds inflicted by the war were deep and lasting".
Despite the apparently carefree nature of much of the music, there is nonetheless an underlying sense of unease to the quintet; it was exquisitely played, with the four strings providing an occasionally lush, sometimes strident backdrop to the virtuosity of Pierre Cayer's oboe.
Bliss and Elgar both served as the Master of the King's Musick, but there is another connection: at the first performance of Elgar's Violin Sonata in 1918, Bliss turned the pages for pianist Landon Ronald.
Like many intellectuals on both sides of the conflict, Arnold Schoenberg was initially all in favour of war. Initially deemed unfit, in December 1915 he was reclassified and volunteered; however his health, never very good (and he was now in his forties) deteriorated and his friends successfully petitioned to have him released from duty.
During his brief period of military service Schoenberg managed to remain in Vienna and teach composition. He found little time for his own composing, however, and one of the few works from this period is Die eiserne Brigade, composed during 1916 for a social event.
During his service he was once asked by an officer "are you this notorious Schoenberg then?" to which he replied "beg to report, sir, yes. Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me".
As Sunday's delightful performance aptly demonstrated, Der eisene Brigade was not written by the "notorious" Schoenberg, but by the Schoenberg who made those wonderful, supremely affectionate chamber transcriptions of Strauss waltzes.
There could be no doubting that this was Viennese music and it was played with sympathy and spirit. A delicious surprise.
Once again, a wonderful afternoon's music-making.
MiV Home