Friday evening was one of the rare quartet sessions that I didn't set up myself. My schedule finally allowed me to accept an invitation to play at the violist's house where I played the Mozart Clarinet Quintet back in January. Unfortunately, he's basically no longer playing: he's 93 years old, and age is catching up with him at last. But he and his wife are still hosting string quartets every other Friday night.
We started with the next quartet in the house Haydn cycle, the B-flat major, Opus 33, No. 4. Since I only have one and a half quartets left to finish my project to play all of the Haydn quartets, you won't be surprised to hear that this was one I'd played before, but it was over a year ago, so it still sounded fresh to me. At least I still chuckled out loud at the false recap, and the very deceptive true recap, in the first movement. Here's a recording: listen to the beginning, and then the section from three minutes in to about three minutes thirty seconds, and see if you can spot the fake recap and the true one. I think it's really hard!
One of the violinists suggested the Brahms C minor quartet, and we all agreed. I would have preferred to play that piece some other time than the middle of the night (the tradition at this house is to gather around 8:30 and have some tea and chocolate first, which means we didn't start playing until 9pm!) but I will seldom pass up an opportunity to play Brahms, particularly with such an excellent group of musicians!
This is a piece with which I have a long history. According to my records, I've played it, or movements of it, six times since starting to play the viola again in 2009, and I have at least one distinct memory of slogging through it before the large gap in my chamber music. And each time, it gets better, which is gratifying. I still got lost a couple of times, once causing a breakdown. I can't rely on my sense of rhythm in Brahms; I really have to count! One of the listening guests was reading the score, and said later: "you know, there's a section in the third movement where no one has anything on the downbeat for bars and bars: I had to close the score, it was making me dizzy". I said, "that's Brahms. That's what he does". So I'm going to continue to play this piece until I get it right. :-)
It's funny: the other composer with whom I need to count more than I do is Haydn. People think Haydn is an easy composer to play, but between his constant jokes and traps, and his love of irregular phrase lengths, I find I have to count like a maniac to avoid mistakes.
Since I'm on a music theory kick, I should mention that that it seems to me that the two quartets in Brahms' Opus 51 are both focused on a different interval. In this quartet, it's the diminished seventh (very clearly outlined in the first few bars of both the first and last movements.); in the second, the A minor, it's the tritone. Unfortunately, neither is a particularly graceful interval to play on a stringed instrument (particularly the tritone), but the music is so good I forgive Brahms his less-than-perfect string writing. :-)
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