Grosser Saal, Mozarteum
String Quartet no.15 in A
minor, op.132
String Quartet no.8 in E
minor, op.59 no.2, ‘Razumovsky’
Lukas Hagen, Rainer Schmidt (violins)
Veronika Hagen (viola)
Clemens Hagen (cello)
This was the third of six
concerts in the Hagen Quartet’s Salzburg cycle of the Beethoven string
quartets. There was a great deal to admire in both performances, although the
Hagens seemed perhaps more attuned to middle-period than to late Beethoven, on
occasion slightly recoiling from the radicalism, the ruptures of the latter.
Op.132 nevertheless opened with great promise, the first movement’s first bars
quiet yet febrile, here seeming almost to presage Bartók. The Allegro proper did not simply begin, but
emerged from the former material,
with a dialectical sense of interplay, indeed mutual self-definition, between
and of those two ‘characters’. This, perhaps the finest movement of the
performance, with considerable cumulative power and emotional intensity, proved
admirably open-ended in terms of possibilities lying ahead, yet anything but
lacking in inevitability when considered even immediately after the musical event:
not the first time anyone has mentally connected Beethoven’s and Hegel’s
dialectical methods. If the following Allegro
ma non tanto lacked the final degree of rhythmic definition, it retained a
good sense of the threat to disintegrate, the trio offering a properly transcendental
swing, with well-judged disruption in that extraordinary passage in unison.
Opening warmth in the Heilige Dankgesang
was aptly followed by austerity, Beethoven’s working out of those two
characters again proving key to the movement’s progress, Palestina haunting
productively. The ‘Neue Kraft fühlend’ section’s sense of leisurely propulsion
was splendidly conveyed, not least through the offices of a slight drag to its
early first beats; likewise the final bars of the movement proved wondrously
luminous. Rhythmic impetus was tied, as it must be, to harmony in the final two
movements, though I could not help but wish for a greater expressive range. It
was fine quartet playing, without a doubt, but might have been taken further to
the edge. This is, after all, a sibling to the Missa solemnis, yet this is perhaps not the most Adornian of
ensembles.
The opening to the second Razumovsky Quartet offered vehemence,
immediately followed by withdrawal; again, the working out between those two
tendencies would be the stuff of the first movement as a whole. I was reminded
quite how extraordinary, even now, it remains that so much music can be
inherent in so little (at least apparently so little) material. Form ultimately
proved more dynamic than it had in the performance of op.132, and the Hagens
seemed more willing to travel to expressive extremes, if still with a greater
reticence than some groups. That reserve was occasionally apparent in an
expansive account of the slow movement; when it was cast off entirely, however,
the expressive rewards were rich indeed. Though it certainly did not lack
vehement impetus, the third movement remained – fair enough – in the realm of
cultivated string playing; abandon is not really the Hagens’ style, but it does
not really need to be. The trio nevertheless gave a sense of digging deeper
still, middle-period Beethoven made, if anything, to sound still more radical
than his later counterpart. Ambiguities, tonal and otherwise, throughout the
motivic working of the finale. There was little doubt that the Hagen players
had found their Beethoven.
