concert review: Music@Menlo
Aug. 7th, 2009 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSo now I've heard all 7 of Felix Mendelssohn's string quartets in concert. How many other composers of n>3 quartets can I say that of? Beethoven (16), Shostakovich (15), but I think not any others.
Op. 80 is quite different from the others. Three movements of tearing anguish and one of somber melancholy, all brilliantly played by the Pacifica Quartet, make you wonder what on earth Mendelssohn would have written next had he not died almost immediately afterwards, and what effect it would have had on the history of music.
The melancholic movement was a requiem for his sister, Fanny, who'd died a few months earlier. Its sad, quiet air - shattered by a car alarm that went off just before the end - was shared by a movement from her own Quartet in E-flat, a surprise addition to the concert. (Someone had mentioned it at a talk earlier, and the Pacifica players had asked if the festival's whizzes could scare them up a copy.) Same is also true for the Cavatina from Beethoven's Op. 130, a work meaningful to Mendelssohn, played as an encore in memoriam for Michael Steinberg, the musicologist and festival mainstay who died a couple weeks ago. Steinberg's wife, herself a noted violinist, had canceled her own scheduled festival appearance but was in attendance at this concert.
Also on the program from Mendelssohn, four assorted quartet movements of various dates collected as Op. 81.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
athenais who was with me was most impressed by the Fugue, No. 4 in the set. My favorite was the Scherzo, No. 2, for the way it offered the Pacifica's two violinists plenty of opportunity to play off each other and display their differing but compatible tones.
Prior to the concert, eight of the festival's international students played the Mendelssohn Octet. Another opportunity to hear that I was happy to have. These were the same eight players who'd done a Spohr Octet earlier in the festival. I'd found that performance warm and sparkling; the same was true here. This was a lighter, brighter performance than the Pacifica and St. Lawrence had done, notable for charm in the slow movement and airiness in the finale. The two constituent quartets sounded more different from each other than in the other performance, lending an antiphonal style, especially to the first movement.
And so Menlo is about to drift to a close, and I must turn my attention to other things.
Op. 80 is quite different from the others. Three movements of tearing anguish and one of somber melancholy, all brilliantly played by the Pacifica Quartet, make you wonder what on earth Mendelssohn would have written next had he not died almost immediately afterwards, and what effect it would have had on the history of music.
The melancholic movement was a requiem for his sister, Fanny, who'd died a few months earlier. Its sad, quiet air - shattered by a car alarm that went off just before the end - was shared by a movement from her own Quartet in E-flat, a surprise addition to the concert. (Someone had mentioned it at a talk earlier, and the Pacifica players had asked if the festival's whizzes could scare them up a copy.) Same is also true for the Cavatina from Beethoven's Op. 130, a work meaningful to Mendelssohn, played as an encore in memoriam for Michael Steinberg, the musicologist and festival mainstay who died a couple weeks ago. Steinberg's wife, herself a noted violinist, had canceled her own scheduled festival appearance but was in attendance at this concert.
Also on the program from Mendelssohn, four assorted quartet movements of various dates collected as Op. 81.
athenais who was with me was most impressed by the Fugue, No. 4 in the set. My favorite was the Scherzo, No. 2, for the way it offered the Pacifica's two violinists plenty of opportunity to play off each other and display their differing but compatible tones.Prior to the concert, eight of the festival's international students played the Mendelssohn Octet. Another opportunity to hear that I was happy to have. These were the same eight players who'd done a Spohr Octet earlier in the festival. I'd found that performance warm and sparkling; the same was true here. This was a lighter, brighter performance than the Pacifica and St. Lawrence had done, notable for charm in the slow movement and airiness in the finale. The two constituent quartets sounded more different from each other than in the other performance, lending an antiphonal style, especially to the first movement.
And so Menlo is about to drift to a close, and I must turn my attention to other things.
