|
FESTIVAL REVIEW
August 12, 2005
|
By Lisa Hirsch
Music@Menlo closed its “Beethoven: Center of Gravity” festival with a group of programs subtitled “Into Eternity: Music Transfigured, 1810-1827.” The subtitle seemed especially appropriate for the very last concert, heard on Friday at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto. It consisted of three towering — and transcendent — works from the 1820s: Beethoven's last Piano Sonata, Op. 111 in C major (1822), his last String Quartet, Op. 135 in F major (1826), and Schubert's String Quintet, D. 956 in C major (1828). Before the music started, co-artistic director Wu Han appeared on stage for some introductory comments about pianist Claude Frank, who was, the audience thought, about to step on stage for the piano sonata. She spoke of what important mentors Frank and his late wife, the pianist Lilian Kallir, had been to her, and said that she felt it would be right and appropriate for Frank to close out the festival's Beethoven performance. Thus, the order in which we heard the quartet and sonata was reversed from the announced sequence.
It was a loving and lovely gesture, but perhaps a musical mistake. I would rather have to heard the three works in chronological order, and I found Frank's performance of the sonata somewhat disappointing, especially between sublime performances of the quartet and quintet. He dropped or missed a distracting number of notes; of rather more concern were some clumsy transitions at repeats in both movements and, crucially, between some of the variations in the second movement, where Frank seemed to lose some musical focus. The first movement could have had more drama, which a wider dynamic range, more rubato, and perhaps a slower tempo would have provided. The Arietta was taken so fast that I wondered how the variations would go. In fact, they were generally good, excepting the problem transitions, but they might have been better taken slower. Around half-way through the movement, in variation IV, the sonata finally took wing, the “heavenly raindrops” (as my teacher Harold Shapero called them) and triple trill achieving a hypnotic intensity. Variations V and VI were played gently, with the closing bars achieving some magic.
There was more than enough magic to go around in the quartet and quintet performances that opened and closed the concert. The works themselves are contrasting miracles that distill and sum up their respective composers' late styles (to the extent that a composer dying at 31 can be said to have a “late style,” in the case of Schubert). The Beethoven is compact and transparent, while the Schubert is sprawling, dense, and overflowing with ideas. They're both humorous in their ways, the Beethoven full of sly wit where the Schubert runs to pastoral bumptiousness in the scherzo and Hungarian drama in the last movement.
The listener has ample opportunities to gaze into eternity, as well. Schubert achieves transcendence in first movement of the quintet, where, after a stormy opening, the achingly beautiful second theme settles into tranquility. The harmonic motion slows as the theme repeats and is subtly varied; the listener feels time has been suspended. In the Beethoven quartet, perhaps the double-forte Grave section before the final allegro achieves this effect (and in the piano sonata, the comparative harmonic stasis of variation IV). The St. Lawrence String Quartet, joined by cellist David Finckel for the Schubert, gave impeccable and deeply moving performances, full of illuminating detail but always delineating the whole splendidly. Every movement was perfectly poised, in tempo, in balance, in rhythmic liveliness. They realized every mood encompassed by the immense emotional terrain of the quartet and quintet, from the charm of the quartet's first movement to its serene third movement to the droll pizzicato near the end of the finale, and in the torrent of shifting moods in the Schubert. I went home in a state of exaltation and vulnerability, feeling stripped bare by the greatness of the music and of the performances.
(Lisa Hirsch, a technical writer, studied music at Brandeis and SUNY/Stony Brook.)
|
