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concert reviews: Op. 260
Jan. 28th, 2011 08:51 pmBeethoven didn't get that high, actually (a few prolific composers, like Milhaud and Hovhaness, have), but add together two performances of his string quartet Op. 130 and that's what you get. Review the first. Review the second.
Beethoven's late string quartets (he wrote five of them within the last three or four years of his life, after a very long gap) are famously difficult and abstruse - there's one or two I still haven't gotten a good grasp on, and I wouldn't review them without the score in hand - but there's a good chance you know parts of this one even if you don't think you do, if you've seen the TV show Firefly or the movie Copying Beethoven. The principal dance music from the "Shindig" episode of Firefly1 is a smooth, sedate performance of the "Danza Tedesca", one of the intermezzo movements of Op. 130, and the rough, charmless music Beethoven is trying to put over after finishing the Ninth Symphony at the end of Copying Beethoven is the brutal countertheme of the Grosse Fuge, the original finale of the quartet.
The original finale? Yes, Op. 130 exists in two states, and I heard both of them this week. Only one movement is different, but it affects the feel of, and more importantly the performers' approach to, the whole work. As I wrote in one review, after the work's first performance in 1826, Beethoven was told by everyone he knew that the Grosse Fuge, with which it then ended, was too long and difficult. So he took out the fugue, of which he'd been so proud,2 and had it published separately,3 replacing it in Op. 130 with a new and gentler Allegro finale, the last composition he ever wrote. It was an odd capitulation for the irascible composer, who'd spent 30 years defying the heavens and declaring himself beholden to no patron, to give in so meekly to others' incomprehension of his music. And it's a gentler, lighter piece all the way through with the new finale than it is in its monumental proto-Mahlerian original form.
The concerts also showed how different two sets of string quartet players can be. One of the ensembles was blazingly brilliant. The other, the more obviously so by contrast in the same work, was ... adequate. The first accompanied their monstrous Beethoven in the program with Schubert's last string quartet, written almost simultaneously with the Beethoven, just as huge and boisterous but with a startlingly distinct character. The second accompanied their quieter Beethoven with some equally tentative, almost anemic performances of Haydn and Janáček, and a more interesting newish work of Peruvian native provenance. Oh, the person I originally invited to accompany me to this concert, who had a schedule conflict, would have liked this piece.
The unexpected part of the second concert was what Stanford Lively Arts is calling "Opening Acts," student-sponsored performances that they're sticking in at the beginning of concerts to expose the audience to something different. This was a modern dance performance by nine women and one man, all undergraduates by the look of them, in coordinated gym clothes. I hope the stage was clean, considering the amount of time they spent wriggling on the floor. The recorded music they danced to were songs by, according to the program, Black Lab, Allie Moss, Ben Harper, and Rachael Sage. I looked up all those names on Wikipedia when I got home, because I'd heard of none of them, though I rather liked the songs, if not enough to want to go out and buy them. They were all approximately in the Suzanne Vega-Tori Amos realm of music, which I am irregularly partial to. Maybe you've heard of what I hadn't. If so, I wonder if you've heard of Gabriela Lena Frank (also on Wikipedia), the composer of the Peruvian string quartet, because I certainly had.
1. The "Mal goes to a ball and fights a duel" episode.
2. His attitude to it in Copying Beethoven is historically accurate.
3. Where it lay virtually unplayed for a century. Sir George Grove in the first edition of his music encyclopedia says it's impossible to judge the fugue because nobody ever performs it.
Beethoven's late string quartets (he wrote five of them within the last three or four years of his life, after a very long gap) are famously difficult and abstruse - there's one or two I still haven't gotten a good grasp on, and I wouldn't review them without the score in hand - but there's a good chance you know parts of this one even if you don't think you do, if you've seen the TV show Firefly or the movie Copying Beethoven. The principal dance music from the "Shindig" episode of Firefly1 is a smooth, sedate performance of the "Danza Tedesca", one of the intermezzo movements of Op. 130, and the rough, charmless music Beethoven is trying to put over after finishing the Ninth Symphony at the end of Copying Beethoven is the brutal countertheme of the Grosse Fuge, the original finale of the quartet.
The original finale? Yes, Op. 130 exists in two states, and I heard both of them this week. Only one movement is different, but it affects the feel of, and more importantly the performers' approach to, the whole work. As I wrote in one review, after the work's first performance in 1826, Beethoven was told by everyone he knew that the Grosse Fuge, with which it then ended, was too long and difficult. So he took out the fugue, of which he'd been so proud,2 and had it published separately,3 replacing it in Op. 130 with a new and gentler Allegro finale, the last composition he ever wrote. It was an odd capitulation for the irascible composer, who'd spent 30 years defying the heavens and declaring himself beholden to no patron, to give in so meekly to others' incomprehension of his music. And it's a gentler, lighter piece all the way through with the new finale than it is in its monumental proto-Mahlerian original form.
The concerts also showed how different two sets of string quartet players can be. One of the ensembles was blazingly brilliant. The other, the more obviously so by contrast in the same work, was ... adequate. The first accompanied their monstrous Beethoven in the program with Schubert's last string quartet, written almost simultaneously with the Beethoven, just as huge and boisterous but with a startlingly distinct character. The second accompanied their quieter Beethoven with some equally tentative, almost anemic performances of Haydn and Janáček, and a more interesting newish work of Peruvian native provenance. Oh, the person I originally invited to accompany me to this concert, who had a schedule conflict, would have liked this piece.
The unexpected part of the second concert was what Stanford Lively Arts is calling "Opening Acts," student-sponsored performances that they're sticking in at the beginning of concerts to expose the audience to something different. This was a modern dance performance by nine women and one man, all undergraduates by the look of them, in coordinated gym clothes. I hope the stage was clean, considering the amount of time they spent wriggling on the floor. The recorded music they danced to were songs by, according to the program, Black Lab, Allie Moss, Ben Harper, and Rachael Sage. I looked up all those names on Wikipedia when I got home, because I'd heard of none of them, though I rather liked the songs, if not enough to want to go out and buy them. They were all approximately in the Suzanne Vega-Tori Amos realm of music, which I am irregularly partial to. Maybe you've heard of what I hadn't. If so, I wonder if you've heard of Gabriela Lena Frank (also on Wikipedia), the composer of the Peruvian string quartet, because I certainly had.
1. The "Mal goes to a ball and fights a duel" episode.
2. His attitude to it in Copying Beethoven is historically accurate.
3. Where it lay virtually unplayed for a century. Sir George Grove in the first edition of his music encyclopedia says it's impossible to judge the fugue because nobody ever performs it.
