Beethoven, String Quartet Op. 59, No. 3, "Razumovsky #3"

I've signed up for another chamber music workshop; this time, the Wellesley Composer's Conference.  I'll be attending the second half of the second week, August 2nd through 4th.  For the afternoon sessions, I've been assigned to play viola in the Schumann Piano Quintet.  For the morning sessions, though, a cellist friend of mine put together a string quartet to play the Beethoven String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, the third of the set dedicated to Count Razumovsky.  (As an aside, I wonder how many of these late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century noblemen suspected that their lasting claim to fame would be as the dedicatee of some piece of music by a famous composer?)

We've had a couple of read-throughs of the quartet, but this week was our first attempt at taking it apart and working on small sections.  We worked mostly on the first movement, and while there were a couple of spots in the main section that needed work (there's one bar with syncopated sixteenth notes for the violins that's a real bear!) we spend most of that time on the introduction.

This introduction is Beethoven at his most audacious and amazing.  It's clearly modeled on the opening of the Mozart Dissonance Quartet that I played and blogged about a couple of weeks ago.  But Beethoven takes Mozart one further.  While the Mozart introduction ventures into far distant keys, it at least starts with repeated Cs in the cello to establish the tonic.  Beethoven starts this quartet with a diminished seventh chord, perhaps one of the most dissonant, and certainly the most ambiguous, chords in Western music.  Its ambiguity comes from the fact that it's completely symmetric, being made up of three minor thirds and an augmented second, which is enharmonically the same as a minor third.  You literally have no idea where it's going, and Beethoven doesn't do anything to clear up the confusion.  There are lots of diminished seventh chords in this short introduction, and lots of unusual resolutions, until you finally have the viola drop down from Ab to G, to clue you in that you're actually in C major, the bar before the introduction ends. 

By the way, does anyone know of a harmonic analysis of this introduction?  Internet research hasn't turned one up, and it would be incredibly helpful for me to figure out my way through this forest of bizarre chords.

As you might expect, this creates a big challenge in interpretation.  The introduction needs to be simultaneously mysterious and secure, a difficult pairing to pull off!  Plus, there's the problem of intonation.  How do you tune an isolated diminished seventh chord?  I'm thinking I need to write up a little introduction to the introduction, to establish the key and prepare that initial surprise. 

At the end of the evening we read through the last movement, but that, amazingly, seems to be in pretty good shape.  Well, we're taking it at a half-note equals 100 (100 beats per minute), which is significantly under the tempo of the recordings (including the one I've linked to).  But we can play it at that tempo, and I think it sounds good: you can hear all the motives from the fugue theme that opens the movement, and how Beethoven plays with all of them as the movement progresses.  The only trick is that it's all up to me.  The movement starts with a viola solo, and if I start too fast, we're in for a train wreck. :-)

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!