Date:  Sunday, January 28, 2007
Time:  3:00 p.m.

Location: Corbett Auditorium
University of Cincinnati
College-Conservatory of Music

Official Website
http://www.artemisquarte
t.com/

About the Program   (Printable Version)

Good old romantic Brahms and arch-modernist Webern - how could they possibly match up?  (Never mind that the Webern pieces we hear in today's notably innovative program were written nearly a century ago.) A connecting link is Webern's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.  In 1933, the Brahms centennial year, Schoenberg gave a lecture which eventually was published in English translation as "Brahms the Progressive" in 1947, fifty years after Brahms' death. Schoenberg cited "advanced" procedures in Brahms' treatment of harmony, rhythm and, especially, his "developing variation" technique in handling motifs.  All true enough, but these Brahmsian features which Schoenberg and his disciples such as Webern extended further in the early 20th Century were, for Brahms, firmly embedded in classical forms and traditions.

Brahms' B-flat Quartet, Op. 67 is a particularly fine example of these innovations growing from classical roots.  The piece was written in the summer of 1875, at the same time he was working on the First Symphony.  With his typical ironic sense of humor, Brahms dismissed this quartet and some smaller pieces from that time as "useless trifles, to avoid facing the serious countenance of a symphony."  Unlike that C-minor Symphony, in which Brahms successfully stood up to the "tramp of a giant" behind him, the spirit of Beethoven is generally absent from this sunny quartet.  Rather, we hear reflections of Mozart (first movement), Haydn (finale), Schubert (third movement) and even Mendelssohn (second movement), but all refracted by every one of the progressive techniques described by Schoenberg.  Indeed, the Quartet, Op. 67 considerably exceeds the magnificent Symphony, Op. 68 in this respect.  Complex cross-rhythms abound in the first movement, while in the second we find measures of 5/4 time inserted into the overall 4/4 flow.  In the scherzo the leading role of the viola is reinforced by muting the other three instruments.  There is also much sensitive interplay between viola and first violin.  The finale provides eight variations plus a coda for a Haydnesque theme which is led through a succession of unusual tonalities before being combined in the coda with material from the previous movements.

In listening to the aphoristic music of Anton Webern, such as his Five Movements for String Quartet, it may come as a shock to realize that this work was written at the very same time that Gustav Mahler was composing the luxuriantly expansive "Das Lied von der Erde" and Ninth Symphony.  Webern himself actually gained a considerable reputation as a conductor of Mahler!  The Five Movements date from 1909, shortly after Webern completed his formal studies with Schoenberg.  This music is atonal, but not yet "twelve tone" or "serial".  Webern gave careful thought to the title:  Five Movements for String Quartet.  He felt that the five entities were not sufficiently linked to form a string quartet, yet were not simply a random collection of five "pieces".  Despite revolutionary sounds - harmonies, melodies, timbres – and the extreme brevity of some of the movements - as little as 35 seconds - traditional forms are not entirely cast aside.  The first movement is actually a very compressed sonata-form piece.  The slow second movement, only fourteen measures in length, directs a melodic line through each of the four voices.  Then comes a cryptic scherzo, followed by another fourteen-bar adagio.  The final movement, also slow, is the longest, fading away at the end.

Between 1911 and 1913 Webern put together another set of pieces for string quartet.  These Six Bagatelles are even more concise than the Five Movements - they total only 57 measures and are played in less than four minutes.  Here we see Webern moving beyond atonality, toward twelve-tone music.  Yet as he wrote to his friend and fellow Schoenberg student, Alban Berg, "Here I had the feeling that when the 12 notes had all been played the piece was over."  The next step, serialism, was yet to come.  Brief as they are, Webern's Bagatelles call for an amazing variety of string techniques.  Every note counts.

There are two sides to the compositional work of Johannes Brahms.  One side is visible - the music which he published.  The other side is hidden, and indeed lost - the apparently large amount of music which he created but subsequently destroyed as unsatisfactory.  By the first measure there are only three Brahms string quartets, yet according to the composer himself he had written and then burned some twenty predecessors.  The first two of the surviving quartets, which were published as Opus 51 in 1873, had been at least eight years in the making.  Brahms seems to have had his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, in mind when he wrote the A-minor Quartet, Op. 51, No. 2.  The first movement makes much of a figure based on the notes F-A-E, an apparent reference to Joachim's motto "frei aber einsam" (free but lonesome), especially since it is later combined with Brahms' own motto F-A-F, "frei aber froh" (free but joyful).  Also, both Brahms and Joachim were fascinated by canons, and the A-minor Quartet is full of them, worked artfully (and musically!) into every movement.  There is an air of moderation about this quartet - there are many flavors to be savored, but none is allowed to dominate or overwhelm.

Edwin Daley

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