Wigmore Hall
Schubert:
String Quartet no.9 in G
minor, D 173
Webern:
Five
Movements, op.5; Six Bagatelles, op.9
Haydn:
String Quartet in B-flat
major, op.55 no.3
Lukas Hagen and Rainer Schmidt (violins)
Veronika Hagen (viola)
Clemens Hagen (cello)
It is rarely anything but a joy
to hear the Hagen Quartet, especially when it comes to the central
Austro-German repertoire. This Wigmore Hall concert of works by Schubert,
Webern, and Haydn proved no exception.
Schubert’s G minor Quartet, D
173, opened the programme. Its first movement proceeded with a ‘rightness’ very
much setting the tone for the rest of the concert. Well judged, without a hint
of complacency, it offered formal dynamism with due flexibility – and a sense
of G minor as a key, as a key with tradition, in the line of Mozart. Lyricism
and turbulence were equal partners, Schubert’s often underestimated – even by
him – skill with counterpoint their midwife. The Andantino smiled through tears, fragile without sentimentality, the
Hagens’ playing as cultivated as the Vienna Philharmonic under Karl Böhm.
Hushed passages drew one in, above all harmonically, with a simplicity that
wanted to be Mozart’s yet, with the pathos of distance, could not quite reach
him. Such, after all, is Schubert. The minuet proved very much an heir to its
counterpart in the ‘Little’ G minor Symphony, distance and affinity again
equally remarkable, as too they were in the post-Mozartian trio. Similarly
posed between precursors and the Romantic future, the finale’s aesthetic drama
unfolded before our ears as if for the first time.
The two following works received
some of the finest Webern playing I have been privileged to hear. In the Five Movements, op.9, the first movement
alone conveyed a full sense of the most concentrated sonata form: not merely structure, but form,
experienced in time, in performance. Crucially, it danced too, old Vienna still
with us; so too did it sing, unmistakeably in Schubert’s line. Dramatically
necessary after that, the second, slow movement seemed more immediately of
Schoenberg’s school. Every note – and so much more than every mere note – told.
An instrumental scena, Webern’s Erwartung: that was how the central
movement, marked ‘Sehr bewegt’, came into our consciousness. Likewise its
successor: how every interval spoke to us, possessed of a meaning seemingly
beyond the ability of words to communicate. Such listening seemed in retrospect
to have prepared us for the final movement, albeit here at least as much vertically
as horizontally: Webern’s music might as well have been serial all along. And
how much music there is here to play and to listen.
Those op.5 Movements seemed on the verge of expansive when compared with the
concision of the op.9 Six Bagatelles.
There was no mistaking, though, the common voice, the composer unquestionably
the same, although the material was entirely different and sounded as such. The
first sounded very much as a first movement in the line of Schubert or indeed
Haydn, whilst the second brought a world transformed as its bracing wind blew.
Terror or passion in the third? Why choose? Webern did not, nor did the Hagen
Quartet. A similar refusal to indulge in the either/or characterised the fourth
piece, a song of torment, consolation, and so much else. Connections between
every note sounded all the more intense, all the more necessary as we reached
the fifth and sixth bagatelles, both movements with character of their own, the
latter every inch a finale in both style and dramatic necessity.
With Haydn’s B-flat major
Quartet, op.55 no.3, we immediately heard the composer in full maturity. Times
on the clock may have been different, but everything counted just as it had in
Webern. Who needs a stage when all the musical world is a stage of the mind and
senses already? Who needs a vocal quartet, when the instruments can sing and
converse like this? Such interplay between ‘characters’, already marked in the
first movement, seemed momentarily exchanged for something more ecclesiastical,
even sacred, at the beginning of the second. Haydn, though, is never to be pigeon-holed,
musical drama between those two tendencies, broadly defined, being revealed as
its musical secret, equipoise almost Mozartian – without ever quite sounding ‘like’
the work of the younger composer, and rightly so. The minuet took nothing for
granted, emerging all the more strongly for it. There were perhaps greater
swing and vigour than I might have expected: again, the Hagens’ performance was
one truly to draw one in. The trio followed on and contrasted, just as one might have hoped, if again never quite
as one expected. With Haydn and with a great performance of Haydn, one must
listen, truly listen. That holds, if anything, still more so for his finales;
at any rate, it certainly did so here. Beethoven, Bartók, and many others,
Schubert and Webern amongst them, would surely have doffed their hats at such riotous invention. I certainly did.
