Sometimes you have a session of chamber music for which the blog post practically writes itself. That's what happened on Sunday. Purely by chance, I played three pieces spaced almost exactly 88 years apart from each other, and nearly played a fourth with a similar spacing. A wonderful trip through music history!
Now that I've finished the Haydn Project, I'm looking for other pieces to play that I haven't played before. Sometimes I think I should have been a bird-watcher or stamp-collector, rather than a chamber musician, since I'm so focused on checking things off my list. :-) Mozart is an obvious choice, but I've played the ten "famous" quartets, and the thirteen I haven't played he wrote in utero and so people tend not to be too psyched to play them. But we found an alternative this morning: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, written in 1788. This is not strictly a string quartet, but it is in the second volume of the Peters Edition of the Mozart quartets, and I hadn't played it before, so I readily agreed.
I have to say, though, that I wasn't very happy with the fugue the first time we played through it. In part that was because one of the players got lost in the middle, which can be suboptimal for counterpoint. :-) But mainly, I think, because, at least as reproduced in the Peters Edition, Mozart marks a dynamic marking of forte at the beginning, and never changes it. Dynamics have always been embarrassingly low down on my list of things to think about in playing and listening to music, but that's starting to change, particularly as I work on the Beethoven Op. 59 No. 3 quartet; dynamics are so central to Beethoven's music. Anyway, the second time we attempted the fugue, we put in our own group dynamics, by bringing out themes and listening to each other, and it was much more satisfying.
Next, we played the Brahms B-flat major string quartet, Op. 67, written in 1875 and first performed in 1876 (so 88 years or so after the Mozart). I think this is one of my absolute favorite string quartets, for so many reasons. Not only is the third movement practically a viola concerto, and the beginning of the fourth movement almost the same, there's just so much more of interest going on. It feels as if it's quite harmonically adventurous, although my theory chops aren't good enough to be sure (although the last movement has, in the viola part, not only B natural and B flat, but B sharp and B double flat; that must count for something). It's certainly rhythmically adventurous, with the usual Brahms nothing-on-the-downbeat and three-against-two, with addition of lots of three-against-four, and even some 5/4 measures (something which I think is very unusual in Brahms). And it's formally very interesting, with the last movement, a theme and variations, bringing in both the first and second themes of the first movement (who knew those were lurking in there?) Add in a gorgeous slow movement, and you have an absolute masterpiece. I don' t know what Brahms was thinking when he called it a "useless trifle", but I think Brahms often said things about his music that were obviously untrue.
We had an extra violinist showing up in time for a short piece (and the lunch following) which provided a quandary: what to play? The problem with violinists (well, one of the problems with violinists :-) is that while one is good, and two are wonderful, three are a complete disaster. IMSLP gave me almost nothing for the combination of three violins, one viola, and one cello: amazingly, no one has arranged any of the famous viola quintets for that combination. I thought we were going to have to fall back on the Pachelbel Canon, with me improvising a viola part from the continuo part. That would have fit the instrumentation (and the accidental theme, nearly, since it's from 1694), but a chance remark reminded me that I had another piece that would work for this combination.
That piece was Terry Riley's In C, written and first performed in 1964 (and so eighty-eight years after the Brahms quartet!). This is a famous piece of modern classical music (there was even a Radiolab podcast about it). In C was one of the first pieces of minimalist music, and also one of the early examples of aleatoric (i.e. chance) music. The score consists of 53 phrases of varying lengths: the instructions are that each musician plays each phrase in order as many times as he or she feel like. The directions say that the group can be aided by someone playing continuous eighth-note Cs; I took on that job. We didn't do a great job: I'd forgotten to print out the instructions, and we didn't try to stay within a few phrases of each other, as Riley directs. But it was great fun, and people were eager to try it again. I'm hatching a plot to get together a large group of strings to play In C on or near the 50th anniversary of its first performance, which will be on November 4, 2014. But hopefully I'll get to play it again before then!
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