Last week, I had two evening sessions of chamber music. Tuesday evening was the Beethoven late C-sharp minor string quartet, Op. 131, and Thursday evening, the Schubert Cello Quintet in C major, D. 956. Before I write about the pieces and my experience with them, a brief digression about one of the difficulties of being an amateur chamber musician.
The problem is trying to find a suitable time to play music when you have a day job. I know this isn't the most sensitive thing in the world to complain about, when there are so many people who don't have jobs who need them. But still, I find it difficult to play music on a work night. We usually start at 7:30pm, and particularly if we're playing a long piece, like the two from this past week, we don't stop playing until past 9:30pm. And then there's the tradition of a snack and conversation afterwards, which is such a part of the whole experience that I hesitate to give it up. And then there's potentially driving home, if I'm not hosting, and then I'm so "up" from the experience that I find it difficult to get to sleep. And when you're my age, going to bed past midnight and getting up at 6am doesn't make for a wonderful work day.
So that's one of the reasons I've been trying to do more playing on weekends. I think that generally works better for me, but it does limit both the amount of time you have to play, and the people you can play with. Still, until I either retire or cut back my work hours, I think that will have to be the best solution. I am eager to hear any suggestions my readers can give me!
On to the pieces. The Beethoven Op. 131 quartet: an amazing piece, and one I don't really feel qualified to say much about. But since when has that stopped me? :-) It is fiendishly difficult, in so many ways, constant tempo changes, for one, but I'll just concentrate on one aspect, the key. C-sharp minor is a very difficult key for string instruments, particularly the viola and cello, since they lose the use of three of their four open strings. For me, that pushes me either to first position with an extended fourth finger to reach G-sharp on the C string and D-sharp on the G string, or half position. Half position is the only way to play a C-harp on the C string, and in a piece in C-sharp minor, you play a C-sharp a lot. And half position makes my brain hurt. :-)
(I am unable to find a good link describing half position. Although I think I would like to read this book, even though I'm somewhat outside the demographic for it. :-)
I wrote above that I lost three of my four open strings playing in C-sharp minor, but that's not strictly true. In the harmonic and melodic versions of the minor scale, you borrow the leading tone from the parallel major. In this case, you replace a B-natural with a B-sharp. And, since B-sharp is enharmonic to C-natural, in effect, for this piece, we replace the C string of the cello and viola with a B-sharp string. :-) And, seriously, by the end of the piece, I was really thinking of that thick piece of silver wound around sheep gut, at the left side of my fingerboard, as my B-sharp string. Listen to the beginning of this performance of the last movement (the actual last movement starts 17 seconds in). The end of the first phrase has the quartet in octaves on B-sharp, and you can hear the open strings of the viola and cello ring!
Because of the pull of this leading tone, it always struck me that C-sharp minor (or major), or, equivalently, D-flat minor (or major) are excellent keys for a string quartet. Too bad they're so difficult to play, and so seldom used. The second Dohnanyi quartet is in D-flat major; I hope to play that someday!
On to Thursday: a bittersweet occasion, the last session with a violinist I've been playing with a lot in the past year, but who's got a great job in another state and so is moving away. She'd asked specifically for the Schubert Cello Quintet, her favorite piece. There had been lots of obstacles in the way of getting this played, but things finally came together, and it was a marvelous evening.
I had been worried about what to play with the Schubert: there aren't that many cello quintets. Brahms wrote one, but destroyed it when he converted the music to his piano quintet. There are lots by Boccherini and Onslow, and ones by Cherubini and Glazunov. I had gotten the parts to the Borodin Cello Quintet on a mistaken recommendation from the second cellist (he was thinking of the famous Borodin Second String Quartet). But in the end, the question of what to play in the same evening with the Schubert Cello Quintet is: nothing. The piece is so long, and so beautiful, that one neither has time nor inclination to play anything else!
I really don't have that much to say about such a famous piece. Well, okay, I have two things to say. First, as I've mentioned before on this blog, one of the things that I find both fun and amusing about playing quartets are the times when the cello goes up high with a melody, I as the violist am always to be found, growling out the bass on my C-string. So, I think to myself, with two cellos in the room, that won't happen, right? Think again! Listen to the beautiful duet between the two cellos that forms the first statement of the second theme in the first movement of the Schubert, and, if you can tear your ears away from the melody, see if you can pick out the pizzicato bass line from the poor, lone viola. (You can catch it at 1:50 here).
The other thing I finally got while rehearsing for this reading was the very end of the last movement. As so often happens with Schubert, he oscillates between major and minor, but the last three notes of the piece are all five players: C, D-flat grace note, C. D-flat isn't in either C major or C minor, and I've never understood what it's doing there. But in my practice, I noticed that the slow movement starts in E major, moves to F minor for the middle section (a semitone higher), and then back to E major for the recap (with a tiny move back towards F minor again just before the end). And the Scherzo is in C major, while its trio is in D-flat major (again, up a semitone and back). So in a sense, the last three notes of the piece are echoing the entire second and third movements, a kind of Schenkerian analysis in miniature! I don't know how much sense that actually makes, but it's enough to make me completely happy with the ending.
A very successful sendoff for my violinist friend, someone I met "cold-calling" from the ACMP list. So let that be a lesson to all of you: blow the dust off your instrument, join the ACMP, and invite people from the list to play music with you! Don't be afraid! Not everyone will be compatible, but some will be, and then you can have a great deal of fun!
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