San Francisco Classical Voice

This being "a Mozart year," as we are by now all weary of being reminded, that the Brentano would arrive bearing Mozart was no surprise. But in fact, the quartet brought Mozart quartets on its 2001 and 2004 visits as well, so this is no opportunistic one-off. Only the size of the helping was different, in two senses: The entire program was Mozart this time, and the quartet was augmented by violist Hsin-Yun Huang.

About the most difficult thing in all of the Mozart chamber music, but in the viola quintets in particular, is simply and solely getting the scale right. It isn't just a matter of avoiding the two familiar extremes — the muscle-bound playing designed for halls seating thousands (and completely untranslatable to smaller venues) on the one hand, and the exquisitely delicate tack seemingly intended to prove that Mozart is not Beethoven. Both, of course, suck the pathos out of the music in their different ways, but between those two extremes there are plenty of other pitfalls. Granted that the music is neither all big-boned robustness nor all fragile pretty-prettiness, but how do you reconcile the vehemence and the grace that are both certainly in there? What sort of tone do you allow yourselves — "tone" not only in the musician's technical sense (attack, vibrato, how close the bow is to the bridge, and the like), but also in the lay listener's sense of "tone of voice"? And above all, how do you deal with the complexity of Mozart's textures? Which lines get subordinated, when, and by how much?

This is a particular problem in the quintets, because Mozart was not one to use a fifth voice the way a cook would use flour to thicken a soup. The instruments are constantly changing alliances, swapping motifs, suddenly emerging as solo voices, or, on the contrary, converging with little or no warning into dramatic unison. In the early B-flat Quintet, K. 174, which opened the program, the expected, obvious pairings are there, beginning with the sweeping first theme announced by Steinberg, to be answered an octave lower by Misha Amory's deliciously woody viola. A little later there are the anticipated violins-vs.-violas contests, usually in thirds (the dashing finale is rife with them).

But what of the extraordinary slow movement, with its muted beginning in unison with what would appear to be "the theme," except that two bars later its harmony is filled out and a graceful violin melody added on top. That opening two-bar "tag" wanders around through the texture, not quite theme, not quite accompaniment, and halfway through the movement precipitates what for Mozart in 1773 is a searing harmonic crisis. And then it comes back at the last, unadorned as it was in the beginning, to close the movement. Or what about the trio's running joke: first violin and first viola, forte, echoed by second violin and viola, pianissimo, with the cello schizophrenically supporting both duos in kind? There's an intricacy of design through the entire piece that surpasses anything in the set of six quartets composed at the same time, and I strongly suspect that the opportunities afforded by that fifth line had a lot to do with it.

The Brentano's approach here, which was to pay even greater dividends in the later music to follow, was never to treat anything as "mere" accompaniment, and to take the music's often sudden shifts of mien seriously without falling into didactic exaggeration. That one wrenching spot in the slow movement, for example, did really hurt — when two violins who have been trotting along in a spirit of amiable galanterie for a couple of minutes suddenly play a harshly dissonant series of suspensions, forte, that appear to come out of nowhere, it had better hurt. But the sound, though fierce, wasn't deliberately ugly, and when equanimity was restored only a few bars later, there was no sense of disjunction, only of crisis gradually and naturally resolved.

Next up was the D-Major Quintet of 1790, K. 593, a vastly more difficult and more sophisticated piece, but one for which the same virtues worked the same magic. I could have done with a little more resonance from cellist Nina Maria Lee in the slow introduction's enigmatic arpeggios, which trade off in dialogue with the other four players. Mark Steinberg, in his own program notes, likens the passage to a contest between Truth (the cello) and Beauty (everyone else), and at least on Sunday it was hard not to feel that Truth not only was outnumbered but sounded it. Once the main allegro took off, though, there was no denying the sheer swing of the music, or the verve with which the triplets and the dotted rhythm danced merrily from line to line. Even the subtle tonal difference between the two violins and the two violas seemed ideal, with Serena Canin's second violin just the slightest bit lighter than Steinberg's first, as Huang's viola was a little lighter than Amory's. When in the first movement's development section everyone lets loose with the main theme's triplet runs in turn, there was no imbalance, just enough coloristic difference that you could tell who was playing what.

The menuetto contains another deftly avoided temptation to didactic playing: twice through the main theme in close canon (that is, two lines playing the same music, but one beat apart). The Brentanos were deadpan here, clear but not determined to underline the device. The same went for a passage in the succeeding slow movement that must be one of the most outré passages in all Mozart, in which a little, decorative descending motif from the main theme develops a singular mind of its own and sets off for ever more startlingly remote keys with each instrument's entrance, until finding a path home seems impossible. Then, with inexpressible serenity, the music wends its way effortlessly back as though there were no trouble at all. This too was deadpan, the strangeness neither softened nor made excessively harsh. The gentle subsidence into the recapitulation was so natural that the genuine weirdness of the music seemed more, not less, obvious, because you could hear that it was coming from within the piece, rather than being imposed from outside.

As for the finale, the Brentanos, like nearly everyone today, used Mozart's original chromatic, slithery version of the theme rather than the "easier" diatonic one an early publisher substituted. And great serpentine fun it was, too, especially that magnificent place where Mozart, having held the trick in reserve for most of the movement, suddenly lets the main theme and the spare second one loose at once in a kind of riot of instrumental mayhem that the Brentanos played for all it was worth.

After intermission came the G-Minor Quintet of 1787, K. 516, which I think it's fair to call the greatest of the lot. The first movement's chromatic lines are the opposite of the jolly ones of the D-Major's finale, wracked with pain and, in the development, dislocating the music over and over again. Then the menuetto, with its violent, dissonant chords and its despairing last phrase. And then happens one of the great Mozart miracles: The trio begins with that phrase over again, but in the major, serene and comforting. It is difficult to make that moment work, and Steinberg did it beautifully, without theatrics, just "all is not like that; some things are like this."

The slow movement that follows, in E-flat Major, is muted, somber, gravely beautiful. The finale following opens with a slow introduction as different as possible: passionate, throbbing, openly suffused with pain. This dissolves into ... one of the jolliest finales Mozart ever wrote, one that, uncharacteristically for the composer, takes up some of the most painful material of the earlier movements and transmutes it effortlessly to joy. Steinberg's note mentions the anguished second theme of the first movement, which turns up here as a jaunty little closing theme. He inexplicably doesn't mention the reprise of that marvelous beginning of the menuetto's trio — the rhythm is different, but the melodic line and the harmony are almost identical. I know of no other instrumental piece of Mozart that brings up comedy out of tragedy as this one does, or travels such a winding road to do it.

And throughout, the Brentano Quartet was superb, grittily intense but not histrionic, graceful but not condescending toward the real strength of the music, and, on a purely technical level, about as accomplished as any quartet playing today. I hope that now that they have taken to making recordings (in a Strad interview maybe five years ago they sounded reluctant to do so), they will start committing some of their excellent Mozart to disc. The timing may not be ideal, what with every great Mozart recording of the last 60 years being brightly repackaged for "Mozart Year" sale, but the year will pass and the recordings will still be there. As they ought to be.