String Quartets: Ravel Quartet in F; Schubert "Death and the Maiden"

Friday evening I had string quartets at my house.  One of the violinists had requested the Ravel quartet; the other Death and the Maiden.  That made for a challenging and long evening, even though we started at 7pm rather than my more usual 7:30pm start time, and even though I didn't try to sneak in one of the few remaining quartets in my Haydn Project. :-)  But a very satisfying evening of music!

One of the side effects of playing lots of chamber music for strings is that, if you're not careful, you can easily end up living on a diet of German music, leavened only by music strongly influenced by the German style, like Dvorak.  Don't get me wrong: I love German composers.  But every now and then, it's great to hear something completely different, and Ravel is a perfect example of that.

The Ravel Quartet in F is, in form, completely in the standard string quartet mode: sonata form first movement, scherzo second movement, slow third movement, fast, driving finale.  But from a purely aural point of view, it sounds absolutely nothing like a Haydn quartet.  It's filled with impressionistic effects: tremolos, fast arpeggios, shimmering, unstable harmonies, extremes of register, complex, shifting rhythms; in short, every color you could imagine from the string quartet palette. Just listen and you can't help but notice the departure from the German model.  Of course, all those effects make it very difficult to play.  I can't say we played it well, but it was, shall we say, recognizable.  And fun!

One comment here: we played from the International Edition, and it was just horrible.  As far as I can tell, just a reprint of the original French edition, with misprints galore.  For example, two eighth notes just missing from the viola part, third movement four measures before the end.  (Checking with the score, an A before the B-flat quarter note, and an A-flat after).  And some of those complex, shifting rhythms could be much more clearly notated.  Can anyone recommend a better edition of this quartet?  Or I'll have to do one myself in my copious free time. :-)

After the Ravel, Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet.  Oh, what an amazing piece!  I don't know what I can say about it that hasn't already been said.  Just go listen to it.  (And thanks again to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for their amazing collection of free chamber music recordings from their concerts!)

Well, maybe I can say two things.   First, I can only echo Schumann's remark about another piece fo Schubert's music : "himmlische Länge" (heavenly length).  But after 9pm on a Friday after a long work week, perhaps more accent on the "Länge" than the "himmlische". :-)


Second, I just learned from reading the Wikipedia article about this piece that it's very likely that Schubert himself played the viola part at the premiere.  Yet another reason why violas are the center of the universe. :-)

Chiara String Quartet Workshop: Dvorak Op. 51, and Herzogenberg Op. 27 No. 2

Yesterday I attended a string quartet workshop given by the Chiara String Quartet at the Northampton Community Music Center.  This was the first time I'd ever been to such a thing, and the first time I'd had any coaching since graduate school.  And I have to say, I had a marvelous time!

The format was as follows: we had coaching from one member of the string quartet for 45 minutes, then 45 minutes to rehearse what we'd learned.  Then a 15 minute break, and then the same pattern.  Lunch, and the afternoon followed the morning pattern.  It felt to be the right amount of coaching and playing for a day, although 45 minutes seemed an awfully short period of time when a coach is saying all sorts of fascinating things.

I had been nervous that my playing wouldn't be good enough, and I'd get some harsh criticism, but all four coaches were very nice, and had nothing negative to say.  I suppose that's not surprising, since if we didn't enjoy ourselves, we wouldn't come back. :-)

Our second violinist is very experienced at being coached, and her suggestion that we just work on one movement, the first of the Dvorak Op. 51 string quartet in E-flat major, was really good: it was just the right amount of music for the day's coaching.

The amount and variety of ideas that the coaches (and my fellow players!) planted in my head almost made my brain explode.  From the very technical: how if you're playing in E-flat major, the E-flat should be sharper than equal tempered to make a just major third with the open G string (I could write a whole blog post on tuning, temperament, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, and the string quartet, but that will have to be another time); how to unify the sound the lower strings need to play with their bows closer to the bridge, which excites more of the higher harmonics in the sound, both clarifying the pitch and making it easier for the violins to blend in.  But there was also a lot of metaphor in a lot of adjectives: hot, cool, open, closed, glassy, pressured, pompous, songlike, dancelike.  As I said, enough to make my brain explode!

I wish my engineering education had had more of this kind of thing.  Maybe engineering isn't really suited to coaching, but certainly the creative spirit, so important in engineering as it is music, isn't fostered by the kind of classroom, test and fact focused teaching I had back in the 1980s.   I'm not being entirely fair: I'm in touch with one of the professors at my alma mater who's been involved in revamping the curriculum, and they've moved it significantly in this direction.

I'm eager to have more coaching.  I'm already signed up for some in early August; maybe I will have other opportunities sooner.

We had a break at the end of the day, and one of our violinists needed to leave early.  Fortunately, I'd brought a collection of trios, and convinced the other two to try the Herzogenberg String Trio Op. 27 No. 2.   As is usually the case, I enjoyed the experience of playing music by an obscure composer more than my partners, but they were very nice about it.  Herzogenberg is often called a Brahms imitator, but I think he has some significant differences from Brahms that show up in his trios.  First, Brahms is incapable of writing a thin texture, but Herzogenberg manages it quite well: the opening phrase of this trio is for cello alone, pizzicato.  And Herzogeberg's string writing is much friendlier than Brahms, particularly his viola parts, which are fun and rewarding to play.   Listen for yourself, and let me know if you don't think this is lovely music!

At the end of the day, we we treated to a concert by the Chiara Quartet: the Brahms Op. 67 quartet, which they're preparing for an upcoming recording.  I love this quartet, both because of the compositional intricacies, but also because the whole third movement and the first quarter of the last movement are practically a viola concerto.  (I'd love to work on this piece with a quartet, but I think I'd need to build up a lot of viola points before I could convince people to do it with me. :-)

The Chiara Quartet gave an absolutely thrilling performance.  I was particularly struck with the completely convincing flexibility of tempo they employed (something else they'd talked to us about during the day).  Fortunately, their recording of this quartet (and the other two, and the G major quintet) has gotten enough Kickstarter funding that it will definitely be coming out.  I'm really looking forward to it!

More Viola Quintets: Mozart K515, Brahms Op. 88, Dvorak Op. 97

Viola quintets for the second evening in a row, and again, for the reason that I was crashing a string quartet party.  Everyone in this quartet was very nice, particularly the host violist, who let me play all the fun parts (at least, that's how it seems to me).  Violinists are used to doing "the dance" of deciding who will play first and who will play second, but violists don't get as much practice at it, so we tend not to do it very well. :-)

I suggested the first piece, the Mozart C major quintet, K515, because I'd just heard it on the Gardner Museum podcast.  What an amazing piece.  Particularly in the first movement, Mozart is writing on a scale he seldom reaches.  My Grumiaux recording clocks in at just under 15 minutes for the movement, which is way longer than any of the other Mozart quintet first movements.  I joke that it's a great example of Mozart not being in a hurry. :-)  It's not surprising that Schubert, a composer famous for not being in a hurry, used this quintet as a model for his cello quintet.

[ A confession to make: one of my background projects is writing variations on Happy Birthday in the style of various chamber music composers.  This first movement is the one I based my "Mozart" variation on: you can pretty much keep everything except exchange the first violin Mozart melody with the much less interesting one from the Hill sisters. :-) ]

This beautiful Mozart melody has a turn in it.  Can I mention how much I dislike the notation for a turn?  When you're sight reading, you have to make quick decisions about what position to be in, and you make those decisions based on the notes you see.  But a turn implies that you're going to have to quickly play a note below the one notated on the page, and you can easily have chosen a bad position for that.  Grumble.  Music notation is fascinating, particularly because of all the features that weren't designed, but just evolved.

I got to play first viola in the slow movement, which is a duet between the first violin and first viola, with the other three instruments accompanying.   I felt the first violinist and I had a good rapport, and I hope that will continue as we play together more.  She did a particularly good job in the last movement, playing the silly Mozart theme in an appropriately silly way. :-)

Next up was the Brahms Op. 88 quintet, which (you'll remember if you're paying attention) was the second time I'd played it in as many days.  I stuck withe the second viola part, and I definitely played better this time: it's almost as if practice does something. :-)  It points out to me that maybe I'm being a little too focused on my "life lists", trying to play so many different pieces of music, rather than focusing on fewer and getting them in better shape.  I guess the only way to reconcile these conflicting desires is to play a lot more. :-)

We had time for only the first two movements of the Dvorak "American" quintet.  This was a piece I'd played three times before, which may be a record for me.  All those times were on second viola, but this time I got to play first viola, and was surprised how different the experience was.  I didn't do a fantastic job in the beautiful solo in the middle of the scherzo: my upper position sight reading on the viola leaves something to be desired.  But I think everyone had fun!

Brahms Viola Quintets, Op. 88 in F major and Op. 111 in G major

I've been playing a lot of quintets recently, rather than quartets (and I'll be playing more this evening). In the case of this evening, there were two reasons: I wanted to get a chance to play with a violist who had been recommended to me without having to give up my C string, and one of the violinists I play with regularly is moving away this summer, and she particularly likes Brahms; we're trying to fill her up before she departs.  It was a wonderful evening of music, although in retrospect, programming both Brahms quintets was a bit of a stretch, and perhaps too much of a good thing.

There are seven pieces of chamber music for strings alone that Brahms published, and they fall neatly into three groups: the two early sextets, Op. 18 and 36; the three string quartets, Op. 51/1, 51/2, and Op 67; and these two late viola quintets, Op. 88 and Op. 111.  I find it hard to feel them as late works: while they have their moments of pathos, in places they're some of the happiest, sunniest music Brahms wrote. 

These are typical Brahms pieces in many ways: lots of three-against-two, lots of nobody-on-the-downbeat, lots of metrical displacement (something that feels like a downbeat, but isn't).  Added to that some difficult meters (there's room for a lot of eighth notes in 3/2, and even more sixteenth notes in 9/8!) and you get what makes Brahms so difficult to play (and we haven't even gotten to his occasionally awkward string writing).  My late wife Roberta Lukes used to quip that playing Brahms was easy: all you had to do was get the notes in the right places and the music played itself.  :-)  If only that weren't so challenging to do! 

I guess the feature that makes these feel late is that they're harmonically adventurous, even for Brahms.  The slow movement of the F major quintet is in the distant key of C-sharp minor (and goes even father afield: you know you're in trouble when you get, not only B sharps and F double sharps, but C double sharps!).  The last movement of Op. 111 can't decide whether it's in B minor or G major, and near the end, the whole group an F-sharp major scale, leading to an F-sharp major seventh chord.  That resolves to a G major chord for the last rollicking section of the movement: a perfectly natural kind of deceptive cadence, but to me, it feels like Brahms is saying, "Oh, %^$#, I'm way too far from the home key.  Well, maybe I'll just pretend that this modulation works, and no one will notice".  (The section I'm talking about starts at about 3:45 on this YouTube video.)

I have grumbled before that Brahms is incapable of writing a thin texture, but, boy, are his thick textures wonderful!  There's nothing quite like the feeling of being in my living room, bathed in an ocean of absolutely gorgeous sound!  Just listen to these pieces, and you'll get an idea what I'm talking about.  If you only have time to listen to a little, the opening of Op. 111 is just incredible, and one of the pieces that gives me such cello envy.  I even transposed the opening solo up an octave so that I could attempt it on the viola.  Technically, it works, but it just sounds all wrong.  Both the violin and cello have wonderful sounds in the upper register: let's just say that the upper register of the viola is an acquired taste. :-)

I got to play second viola all evening, which worked out well: firstly, because it's the closest I'm actually going to get to being a cellist, and secondly, because out guest violist was an absolutely wonderful player, with amazing tone on the big viola solos.

One note about editions: we played both quintets from new Peters editions, but they leave a lot to be desired.  Some misprints (a missing eighth rest in the second viola part of Op.. 111: page 15, fourth line, last measure), some bad page turns (but who knows if there could be better ones) and some editorial choices that enraged one of our violinists.  The opening of Op. 88 is marked "IV" for the first violin, specifying that the entire passage should be played high on the G string.  But Op. 88 is one of the few Brahms works for which we have the manuscript, and as you can see, Brahms indicates nothing of the kind.  This kind of thing is enough to make me want to do my own edition of the Brahms quintets.  In my copious free time. :-)

A last off topic note; I've written before about my new white LED downlights.  I was practicing earlier this week, and looked at my C string while tuning it.  I saw a bizarre strobe effect, as if the string were just wobbling back and forth.  I figured out what was causing it: the LEDs must be getting AC current, and in each downlight, half the LEDs are turning on each half cycle of 60Hz.  So the fixtures as a whole are flashing at 120Hz: too fast to be noticeable as a flicker to the unaided eye, but enough to make the 130Hz viola C string look like something you'd see at the Boston Museum of Science. :-)

Haydn, Op. 17, No. 2, and Beethoven, Op. 135

Finally getting back to chamber music after what feels like a long break (I was on vacation in California and didn't bring any instrument with me).  And, of course, starting back up with Haydn.  I took advantage of a quartet with an excellent violinist and an obliging cellist to cross off another of the Opus 17 quartets, No. 2 in F major.  Haydn wrote these quartets for the virtuoso violinist at Eszterhazy, Luigi Tomasini, so the first violin parts are filled with double stops and intricate passage work.  And these were written before Opus 20, when Haydn realized that the violist and cellist might want to have interesting things to play, too. :-)

But even so, this is a beautiful quartet.  I find the closing theme of the first movement enchanting: there's just something about the harmony that moves me, even though the passage is just a few measures long.  (Our second violinist claims it was her B natural, and I have no reason to doubt her).  And as much as I enjoy the more equal distribution of interest in the later Haydn quartets, there's something wonderful about the pure first-violin arias that you often get in the slow movements of the early works, and this is a fine example.   And in the last movement, Haydn shows himself, as always, inventive in his sonata forms, turning a simple bass line, shared by the cello and viola in the exposition, into a much more involved example of counterpoint in the recapitulation.

Staying in F major, we moved to Beethoven's last string quartet, the Opus 135.  Oh, I wish I had had more time to practice this: I really shouldn't have scheduled late Beethoven only a few days after I'd returned from vacation.  But it was okay, and we had fun.

It's hard to describe how bizarre and outlandish the late Beethoven string quartets are.  It feels as if they were written a century before their time.  Certainly Beethoven's contemporaries could make nothing of them: I've previously quoted Louis Spohr's remark that they were "an indecipherable, uncorrected horror".  And while Mendelssohn modeled his Op. 13 after them, he only used the least unconventional ideas.  I think it's fair to say that the rest of the nineteenth century ignored these quartets: it isn't until Bartok that you feel a continuation of the compositional ideas of the late Beethoven quartets.

Just one example of one of the oddities in Opus 135: in the trio of the scherzo, the second violin, viola, and cello play, in octaves, the same measure over forty times in succession, while the first violin plays a kind of melody above.  (The passage is just after the two minute mark here).  It's bad enough for the poor second and viola, but because the cello is a larger instrument, one can't easily play the passage in one position.  You can see on the video how the left hand of the cellist is frantically moving up and down, while the two inner strings can keep theirs still.  Last night, our cellist tried thumb position, not usually used for notes so low on the instrument.  It seemed to work, although she said that it would be very difficult to get to thumb position there reliably and quickly.

The slow movement is in the wonderful key of D-flat major, with five flats.  The middle section goes from major to minor, but Beethoven chooses the enharmonic key of C-sharp minor, which has four sharps.  Confusing: a bit like crossing the International Date Line (or a branch cut for you math geeks out there).   Beethoven has to do this because D-flat minor doesn't exist as a key, because it would have eight flats and you can only have seven in the key signature.  Although I think it would be really cool to have a B-double-flat in a key signature.  And, yes, I know that I have a very strange sense of what would be really cool. :-)

I have to admit, I don't get the last movement at all.  It's subtitled "Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß" ("The Difficult Decision").  The slow introduction is marked "Muss es sein? (Must it be?)" and the succeeding Allegro "Es muss sein! (It must be!)"  I've always heard this explained that Beethoven, months away from death, is wrestling with the eternal question.  And the introduction is as anguished as anything he wrote.  But the Allegro!  I could have understood a feeling of resignation, of acceptance, of maybe even joy.  But what you get is something happy, maybe even mischievous.  And the pizzicato ending is downright silly.    If anyone can help me come up with a way of understanding this, I'd appreciate it!