Attending a Chamber Music Concert

Saturday evening I am taking some friends to see a chamber music concert with the Fine Arts Quartet. Here is the program:

Mozart: String Quartet No. 19

Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 11

Debussy: String Quartet

I often go to these with a violinist friend, but on this occasion I am also taking another friend and her two children, aged eight and ten. So that will be a bit different. Usually I sit with a musician crony and we mutter to one another about how they are over-shaping the dynamics or  something. On one occasion three of us (myself, a violinist and a cellist) were listening to a bassoon trio play a piece that was not on the printed program, nor had they announced it. At the end we all looked at one another and said in unison: "Hummel!" You know, I think it actually was Hummel.

But at least three of the attendees on Saturday will be both less familiar with the repertoire and certainly a lot less catty! So I was thinking, what might I say to my friend and her kids about the music? While certainly cultured, I don't think she is a chamber music aficionado as when I said that the Fine Arts Quartet was playing she said, "oh, good, a fine arts quartet." No, I replied, the Fine Arts Quartet. Which sounds unutterably pompous, I know. But hey, I worked hard to get this pompous.

So, ok, time to put my musicology, or at least my teacher, hat on. Listening to this music is like taking a journey--not to a strange and unfamiliar land, but to a strange and unfamiliar mind and time. It is to enter into the inner person of someone who lived in a different place and time. Let's start with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who lived in the 18th century. He was one of the most unusual people who ever lived. Every time you hear something about a really gifted child today, someone who astonishes us with their ability, they are really following the example of Mozart. He is the first famous child prodigy in music history. We may marvel at a young singer who can sing opera arias at age twelve, but by age twelve, Mozart was already famous throughout Europe and had already written two operas! Oh yes, and many, many symphonies, piano sonatas and so on. He had to hurry as he was going to die quite young, at thirty-five. He started composing at five years old. He lived in Austria, first in Salzburg, a not very big town about the size of our town, where he worked for the Archbishop, a very powerful fellow. Then he moved to Vienna. He also traveled a lot with his father, to Germany, England, France and Italy where he was commissioned to write an opera for the big theater in Milan, La Scala. The string quartet we are going to hear, so famous it has a nickname, the "Dissonant" Quartet, was written when he was just short of his twenty-ninth birthday. It is called "dissonant" (meaning with notes that clash in the harmony) because of its very adventurous harmonies in the slow introduction. It is so unusual that when he sent it to an Italian publisher they wrote back and asked him to fix the "misprints"! Here is the Hagen Quartet, playing in Salzburg.

We go to an even stranger place with the second piece, the quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich. He lived his entire life in what was the Soviet Union, now Russia. Russia is a country with a very strong creative tradition in music, just think of composers like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, but times were very difficult between the Revolution of 1917 and 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and became Russia once more. Much of Shostakovich's life was under the horrific rule of Joseph Stalin who persecuted, starved and executed millions upon millions of his own people. As music was so important to the Russian people, Stalin took a particular interest in the career of Shostakovich, who was the leading Soviet composer. Shostakovich's music was condemned on a couple of occasions which meant no performances and no commissions for quite a while. He lived in constant fear of being shipped off to a Siberian concentration camp. He had lost in-laws in that way and even had friends in the theatre world simply executed. For years he kept a packed suitcase by the door in case the secret police came for him in the middle of the night. His Quartet No. 11 was written in January 1966 which  puts it between two of the best albums from the Beatles: Rubber Soul and Revolver. What we hear in the string quartet is the experience of fear and paranoia somehow transcended through music and Shostakovich's unique sardonic humor. And we experience this from the inside! This is the Allegri Quartet.

The music of Claude Debussy is quite different. While Mozart is all elegance and charm and clarity and Shostakovich is all dark, threatening moods, Debussy's music is diaphanous (meaning delicate, airy, like translucent fabric), lustrous (meaning filled with light) and colorful. He uses the instruments to create landscapes of beauty. Debussy was French and lived in a world of aesthetic refinement when Paris was the artistic center of the world towards the end of the 19th century. His main struggle in life was against the ingrown conservatism of the French musical establishment, typified by the Conservatoire where students had to follow a formidably academic course of instruction. Once past that hurdle (he spend eleven years at the Conservatoire) he blossomed into a very fine composer, much loved by audiences ever since. This is the Esmé Quartet from South Korea playing in Norway.