San Francisco Classical Voice

It is easy to hear what attracted Gustav Mahler to arrange Beethoven’s Quartet No.11 in F Minor, Op. 95, “Serioso,” and Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, “Death and the Maiden,” with which the concert concluded. He wanted to flesh them out and to draw out their dramatic qualities and, most important, to re-create them by conducting them himself. No matter that this violates one of the prime raisons d’etre of the art of chamber music — that is, that the various parts should be autonomous and free to interact as individuals, however homogenous they may be made to sound.

Whatever else they may say, performers who make transcriptions do so because they want to play them. Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s songs exist because he could be both singer and pianist, and it was not always the singer that predominated. These are like new compositions, and the flourishes that Liszt added would probably have appalled Schubert. In spite of this you feel he is being faithful (in his fashion) to the original.

The Moscow Soloists are a relatively small group — probably less than half the size of the orchestra Mahler would have used. In their performance of the Beethoven quartet, I never quite heard either Beethoven or Mahler. I missed Beethoven’s quirkiness and, above all, the flexibility of tempo that is needed if the works of his later period are to succeed. Bashmet seemed ill at ease on the podium, and what guidance he offered often inhibited the players as much as it helped them.

The Schubert/Mahler “Death and the Maiden” was a bit more successful as a transcription. Both composers were overtly Viennese — you can hear it in their love of the ländler and their penchant for quoting their songs in larger works. Mahler found his doppelgänger in the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. Its double quotation in one of his Songs on the Death of Children (the Kindertotenlieder) attests to its special meaning for him. As far as the performance went — and it went fast — I couldn’t help but feel that both Mahler and Schubert were somewhere shaking their heads and saying, “Did I write that?”

As a performance, the highlight of the evening was Tan Dun’s Concerto for Pipa and Strings (with vocal obbligato). Here, the Muscovites really pulled together and seemed to enter into the spirit of the thing, especially enjoying their shouts of “Yao,” and the opportunities to indulge in various slides and fiddle effects. The pipa soloist, the lovely Wu Man, obviously relished her part, arbitrating the various styles that mirrored the composer’s musical journey during China’s Cultural Revolution, a time when to profess love for anything Western — Bach for instance — put one’s life in jeopardy.

Hearing the strings offer a Bach quotation in C-sharp minor, interrupting the pipa’s pentatonic scales, made you feel as if the music were traveling through the earth from the other side of the world. Of course it would be banned as something from the devil. Later the spirit of Shostakovich is invoked and you sense a common struggle among composers living under repressive governments, to both affirm life and protest injustice. The ending of the concerto was a pipa solo over a soft added six chord, which invoked both the conclusion of Mahler’s Song of the Earth, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, encapsulating the meeting of high and low culture.

Bashmet appeared as viola soloist in Britten’s Lachrymae for Viola and Strings, Op. 48a. This didn’t come off for the reasons mentioned above. The dynamics in this piece are crucial, and although there were loud and soft, there wasn’t enough shading to make a convincing emotional statement. Bashmet played expressively, but it is difficult to weep, play, and conduct simultaneously. Britten invokes John Dowland at the end of the piece in one last assault on our tear ducts, but in this case it was too little, too late.