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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 23, 2019
"I remembered these days that it is exactly twenty years since I first met you...I am occupied with composing. Have finished a Trio (4 movements). Today the second movement of the quartet, that I began composing while here, was finished. I started the third movement (the penultimate) without a pause. To commemorate the aforementioned anniversary, I would like to dedicate the quartet to you."
Dmitri Shostakovich, writing to his friend Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin on September 6, 1944, was talking of his Piano Trio No.2 and String Quartet No.2, which were premiered together on the 14th of November. Both works fall into what musicologist Joachim Braun has called the first period of Shostakovich's "Jewish works". While not himself Jewish, Shostakovich was repelled by anti-Semitism and quite probably also wished to express his disgust at its rise in the Soviet Union. According to Judith Kuhn, in her major study of his first seven quartets, Shostakovich's "twist" on folk music was "to make use of the inflections of the music of Eastern European Jewry, an ethnic group historically oppressed within Russia and Eastern Europe. 'Jewish' inflections, whether related to klezmer or to sacred sources, saturate the Second Quartet with their syncopated rhythms, 'oom-pa' accompaniments, ambivalent minor-mode dances, and 'oriental' augmented seconds".
The Pacifica Quartet closed the first half of Tuesday's excellent VSMF concert with a dazzling performance of the second quartet. The opening movement was particularly intense and rhythmically vital, with the second subject possessing a typically Shostakovichian sinister playfulness and the development second a distinct air of brutality. (One can only image what Stalin might have thought of the music; perhaps he was too occupied with the progress of the Red Army through Eastern Europe.)
The second movement's lengthy, keening recitative was superbly played by first violinist Simin Ganatra; the romance which followed, introduced by the eloquent cello of Brandon Vamos, nevertheless was underlain with a distinct sense of unease, before the return of the recitative and the final, ambiguous major cadence.
The third movement's eerie waltz contains distinct echoes of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (completed in 1936, suppressed by the composer and not performed until 1961) and was particularly urgent, leading to the theme and variation finale, the theme being taken from the first movement of the contemporaneous piano trio. Once again the quartet's playing was particularly intense and propulsive, indeed it became almost frenzied at times.
This was a wonderful performance, the Pacifica Quartet clearly have the full measure of Shostakovich's uniquely ambiguous idiom.
There are two names in the history of the clarinet which every music-lover should know and treasure: Anton Stadler (1753-1812), whose playing inspired Mozart to compose the first masterpieces for the instrument, and Richard Mühlfeld (1856-1907), of the Meiningen Court Orchestra. After hearing Mühlfeld play Weber's first concerto and Mozart's quintet, Brahms revoked his earlier decision to retire from composition and wrote his final four chamber works, all featuring the clarinet.
The best-known of the four is probably the Clarinet Quintet, Op.115, which closed Tuesday's concert.
Clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester joined the Pacifica Quartet for a sumptuous performance of the quintet. The opening chords, affectionately played by the strings, serve as an introduction to the clarinet and Franch-Ballester immediately impressed (although that is probably too mild a word) with his gorgeous, velvety tone. The movement was muscular without ever becoming strident, indeed was quite inner-directed in places, yet also passionate and with a distinctly crepuscular air.
The slow movement was almost unutterably lovely and completely engrossing. Although still only in his sixth decade, here Brahms lays out a lifetime of regret and an almost overwhelming sense of loss for all to witness.
The andantino, gently lilting, framed a deliciously busy, more conventionally scherzo-like central section, before yielding to the theme-and-variations finale, in which the theme seems to begin in mid-flow. Here, as in the previous movements, the playing of all five musicians was irreproachable: the noble cello of the first variation, the intensity of the second, the delicious partial dialogue between the clarinet and first violin in the third, the sublime cantabile of the fourth and the arabesques of the fifth, before the music of the work's opening suddenly, and ominously, reappears (Brahms apparently anticipating TS Eliot's "In my end is my beginning") and the music subsides to its distinctly uneasy conclusion.
I have lost count of the number of performances of this quintet I have attended, but can confidently say this this was undoubtedly one of the finest.
The quartet opened the evening with something of a rarity, in the shape of Turina's La Oración del Torero (The Bullfighter's Prayer).
After a brief tremolando introduction which almost inhabits the fairy world of Mendelssohn, there enters a melody which is distinctly and inimatably Spanish.
The quartet, displaying a commendable unanimity of tone and phrasing, handled the work's many changes of mood and tempo immaculately, from the opening to the ethereal close. For a prayer, though, the music seemed quite long and I confess to wondering just what the bull would have been doing all this time. Stamping its hooves impatiently, perhaps?
This was a splendid opening to this year's Victoria Summer Music Festival and I am especially pleased that I managed to discuss the Brahms without once using the word "autumnal".
Damn...
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