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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
August 9, 2017
"How is it that people who love music so much that they can cry when they hear it, can at the same time commit such atrocities against the rest of humanity?"
For those of us who like to believe that the arts, and music in particular, can have a civilising influence, this question, posed in 1942 by Polish composer Simon (Szymon) Laks, is a distinctly uncomfortable one.
Laks, or as he was at the time, Number 49543, the leader of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp Orchestra, had every reason to pose the question. And having survived two years in Auschwitz and a further six months in Dachau, before its liberation on 29 April 1945, he had every reason to composer angry, bitter music.
Laks' String Quartet No.3, his first piece "after Auschwitz", was premiered in Paris on November 25, 1945, which in itself is remarkable enough. And yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the quartet is how little overt anger and bitterness it displays.
For me, the Dover Quartet's outstanding performance of Laks' third quartet was probably the highlight of their concert on Thursday, which closed the 2017 Victoria Summer Music Festival.
Some dozen Polish folk melodies have been identified in the work's four movements but, of course, the quality of the music depends not on the composer's source material, but on what he does with it. The opening movement, for example, has a bouncy first theme and more lyrical, plaintive second, yet they were completely integrated into the texture of the music whose apparent sanguinity is underlain by a profound sense of uneasiness, as if to remind us that even the most tranquil and apparently hospitable surroundings can reveal a deep-rooted violence and hostility.
The second movement was sombre, yet portrayed in lush tones; I was particularly taken by Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt's mournful viola solo — I suspect this was "Idzie zolnierz borem, lasem, przymierajac z glodu czasem" ("Through the dense and light-hearted forest, a soldier goes close to starving") — and the intense concentration of the playing in general. This movement, in particular, was deeply moving, with its final dying downward chromatic glissando seeming to refer to the unthinkable.
The scherzo sounded almost joyous in parts, with its gently lilting trio; whereas the finale, musically visiting the "southernmost tip of Poland, the Tatra Mountains, and the Podhale", opens with a "Gaik" melody, which was played to accompany a rainy procession with decorated saplings — a custom not only in Poland, but in other Slavic and Balkan countries in the springtime. There is a brief and highly-effective imitation of a hurdy-gurdy before the helter-skelter coda, whose slightly unresolved final chord leaves us, once again, with that feeling of unease.
This was superb music, albeit deeply unfamiliar, superlatively played.
Highlight of the concert? On second thoughts it was, for me, one of the highlights of the entire festival.
Antonín Dvořák's String Quintet No.3, Op.97 is the third, and arguably least familiar, of the major works he composed in Spillville, Iowa in the summer of 1893. It was premiered in New York on 13 January 1894, coupled with Op.96, the "American" Quartet, which was receiving its second performance inside two weeks. (Op.95, in case you have forgotten, is the "New World".)
For this quintet, as with his first (a very early work, it is his opus one) Dvořák added a second viola to the string quartet, unlike Schubert, with his second cello, and Dvořák's own second quintet which, unusually, added a doublebass.
David Harding joined the Dover Quartet for a sumptuous performance of the quintet, which closed the evening, and the festival, in fine style.
The opening movement was engrossing, carrying the listener along like a river in full spate; the scherzo was vital and fleet of foot; the theme-and-variations slow movement, with the melody shifting from instrument to instrument and marvellously inventive accompanying textures (whether the pizzicato throbbing was truly inspired by Native American drumming is a question I feel unqualified to answer) was pure unalloyed joy from beginning to end; and the cheerful rondo which is the finale was exuberant and joyful, sending the audience out of the hall with smiles on their faces.
The Dovers opened their concert with Tchaikovsky's first string quartet. It is an early work, Op.11 and does not, in my opinion, show the composer at his best.
Despite the lovely tones which suffused the music; despite the affectionate playing of the famous andante cantabile, with exquisitely observed dynamics; despite the syncopated bounce of the scherzo; despite the vivacity of the finale I was still left with the feeling that Tchaikovsky's grasp of structure was still less than total, that his idea of variation was distressingly simplistic and the the music simply meandered for far too much of its length.
There were any number of moments where rhetorical tricks which worked in his symphonies because of his genius for orchestration simply failed to make their effect given the far more homogeneous textures of four strings.
The great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler was supposedly approached by a young Rafael Kubelik after a performance of Mahler's Fifth and asked for his opinion. "You did it very well", the older conductor replied, "but why bother?"
Which pretty accurately sums up my feelings about the Tchaikovsky, as played by the Dover Quartet.
Still, as the old saying has it, two out of three ain't bad: the Dvořák was wonderful and the Laks a major discovery.
The Dover Quartet go from strength to strength.
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