MiV Home
Phillip T Young Recital Hall
June 10, 2015
Franz Liszt is said to have described Felix Mendelssohn as "a genius, who became a talent". Which is a little harsh, even if one does understand what he was getting at.
But it also sets one to contemplating the difference - and the huge, unbridgeable distance - between the two. Wednesday's opening concert of the 2015 QuartetFest West offered music by two talents, one undoubted genius and one contemporary composer whose place in the Grand Scheme of Things I am happy to let posterity decide.
Kelly-Marie Murphy's new piano quintet, "In a World of Motion and Distance" was the last work on the programme and was being heard in Victoria for the first time, in conjunction with the launch of the latest CD by the Lafayette Quartet.
There could be no doubting the "motion" aspect of the music: the outer movements were almost dizzyingly fast and both played with an almost frightening degree of precision. The opening movement string figurations occasionally hinted at Bernard Hermann's score to "Psycho", which is no bad thing, but I was less happy with those passages where the pianist's left hand was doubling the cello (or vice-versa) and thus masking it.
A sustained piano chord led directly to the slow second movement, which may or may not have added "distance" to the mix - it certainly added emotion, with a wonderful high, keening cello line and an overall intensity which, even if it sounded a bit 1930s to my mind (Honegger?), certainly held the attention until the furious and surprisingly jolly finale.
A fine addition to the repertoire, brilliantly played.
Although Joseph Haydn might well be the counterexample to Liszt's plaint - a talent who, by dint of sheer application unleashed his "inner genius" (as today's pop psychologists would doubtless express it) - his brother Michael, although fêted in his lifetime, has been judged less kindly by history than his brother.
Take his String Quintet in C, MH187, for example. For some considerable time this was attributed to Joseph and even appeared in print as Joseph's Opus 88.
Yet, despite a number of felicitous touches, it is difficult to understand today how the confusion arose. It is undeniably a charming work and was deliciously played by the Lafayette Quartet and violist Yariv Aloni, but there were numerous occasion when I could not help but feel that Joseph would have made more out of the material than his brother.
I was particularly taken with the slow movement, in which first violin and viola apparently play the theme in canon, yet this was a canon in which the distance between the players was rarely constant. The supporting pizzicato accompaniment from the second violin and viola over bowed cello was also unusual and the minor key section quite lovely, although scarcely profound.
The players injected a good deal of humour into the minuet and took the finale very quickly indeed - but only because the music required speed, not in any sense of exhibitionism.
Johann Nepomuk (really) Hummel is another of history's also-rans. Perhaps the most interesting facet of his Piano Quintet Op.87 (arranged from an earlier septet) is its scoring, for piano, violin, viola, cello and doublebass: Schubert wrote his "Trout" quintet for the same combination, but there the similarities end.
Pianist Alexander Tselyakov and bassist Darren Buhr joined seventy-five percent of the Lafayette Quartet (violinist Ann Elliott Goldschmid taking a break) for a performance which made, I suspect, as good a case for the Hummel as can be. If I remained unconvinced, blame Hummel or blame me, not the performers.
Which leaves Dmitri Shostakovich as the undisputed genius of the evening - although that assessment has tended to be posthumous.
"I believe that the expressive potential of dodecaphony is very limited. At best it is capable of expressing conditions of depression or paralysing fear", Shostakovich said in an interview in 1958.
Shostakovich's thirteenth string quartet is, uniquely among the fifteen, cast in a single movement. Completed in August 1970, the music is dark and exploratory and employs a number of "tone rows" (i.e. one which uses all twelve notes of the octave without repeats), although they are not developed according to Arnold Schoenberg's rules for serial composition.
However, "depression and paralysing fear" may well have been the intention - certainly Shostakovich's health was giving him cause for concern at this time - and it has been suggested by Russian musicologist Olga Digonskaia that he adapted music from his score for "King Lear" to become the opening and closing sections of the quartet. Perhaps he had Gloucester's "We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves" in mind.
The Lafayettes have a special relationship with the music of Shostakovich which nobody hearing this performance could have doubted. The four musicians displayed a wonderful unanimity of tone colours and phrasing, yet were quite willing to make the ugly sounds demanded by the score in the violent central section - "a jam session from Hell" according to Eugene Drucker of the Emerson Quartet.
The quartets ends as it began, bleakly and with no crumb of consolation offered.
Happily, this was not the last music of the evening.
QuartetFest 2015 is certainly off to a flying start.
MiV Home