Salzburg Mozartwoche (5) - Hagen Quartet, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, 30 January 2024

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Haydn: String Quartet in D minor, op.76 no.2, Hob. III:76, ‘Fifths’
Mozart: String Quartet in D minor, KV 421/417b
Beethoven: String Quartet in C-sharp minor, op.131

Lukas Hagen, Rainer Schmidt (violins)

Veronika Hagen (viola)

Clemens Hagen (cello)

Image: Wolfgang Lienbacher

Three string quartets in minor keys, two of them in the same minor key, might sound like an overload of misery, or at least darkness, but matters were more mixed in this Hagen Quartet Mozartwoche recital. It was not exactly full of the joys of spring, but then we have some way to go in our Winterreise before we reach such joys. More to the point, we could enjoy a cornucopia of invention from three of the supreme masters of the genre, Mozart rightly at the centre. 

Haydn was, of course, as close to the inventor of the string quartet as makes little matter, certainly its ‘father’ in a way he was not, as once was claimed, of the symphony. He was represented by his ‘Fifths’ Quartet, written at least five years after Mozart’s death, but his voice arguably seemed the oldest here, not least with respect to a surprising approach towards ‘early music’ sound at its opening. Whatever the issues of ‘style’, motivic integrity and emotional intensity are the crucial things for the first movement; they were certainly to be found here. The development’s very particular course was vividly communicated, bringing us to a recapitulation of drama, both on the motivic and the broader harmonic levels, midway between the High Baroque and Beethoven. Melodic grace and expressive depth characterised the second movement variations, major/minor oscillation key to their progress. Vigour and rigour were insistently common to both minuet and trio, as well as to the finale. We tend to associate the daemonic with Mozart and Beethoven in this key, but Haydn here made his claim just as strong, through material and sheer originality in its working that could be only his. This was a fine mental work-out, moving in equal measure: that is, first-rate Haydn. 

Mozart in D minor followed: the second of his quartets dedicated to Haydn. Not that it did not possess many of the qualities ascribed above to Haydn, but what struck me immediately was the greater, more personal pathos, inviting one in to a drama whose subjectivity suggested this might actually be ‘Mozart’s’ drama too, albeit with a question mark such as one would never sense, rightly or wrongly, with Beethoven. The Hagen Quartet made no apologies for the complexity of the first movement, greatly admired by Schoenberg, its development counterpoint Janus-faced in protomodernism and archaism—or so one could fancy. The turn to the minor for the recapitulation’s second group was echt-Mozart, of course, and so it sounded here. The Andante first breathed a warm consolation that was yet fragile, followed by a vehemence sometimes tragic, sometimes merely stark: terms were thus set, to be properly developed. There was no doubting the vehemence of the minuet either, nor the necessary contrast of memories of Salzburg serenading in its trio. If the finale seemed to suggest Schubert, it often does on the page too. The idiocy one often hears about Classical variation form somehow being lesser than that of the Baroque or Romanticism was once again so utterly confounded as to have one wonder how anyone might have thought such a thing in the first place. Perhaps the Hagens might have exercised a tighter grip at times, but there was virtue in not pressing too hard. 

By the end of that first half, my ears were ready for a new key. Beethoven offered that – and not only that – in the advent and unfolding of his C-sharp minor Quartet. The ineffable sadness of the first-movement fugue, so moving and prophetic for Wagner, was expressed without exaggeration, material apparently speaking ‘for itself’, albeit with a (relatively) gentle sforzando nudge for the final note of the subject during the exposition. Everything, it seemed, came from its first statement. As Webern once put it, ‘To develop everything … from one principal idea! That’s the strongest unity… But in what form? That’s where art comes in!’ Art certainly came in here, at its rarest and most sublime. For whilst this is undoubtedly holy ground, it was so not because we have designated as such, but through intense, honest, ultimately radiant expression: Beethoven’s, above all, but also surely that of the performers. 

A quizzical second movement and good-natured third led us to twin complexity and simplicity in the central fourth. Depth and direction were prey to ‘late’ instability, yet were never quite defeated, that instability transformed into a guiding principle for the scherzo whose manic rigour seemed to take us all the way to Bartók, even Schoenberg, and perhaps even beyond. It may, even though one ‘knew’ otherwise, have seemed to be hurtling towards a conclusion, but serene intervention in the guise of the sixth movement and something approaching tragedy in the finale ensured there were no easy answers—or even questions. This final movement hallowed both ‘old’ and ‘new’, again posing the question ‘how to end it all?’ A signal strength of the Hagens’ performance was that, again irrespective of whether one ‘knew’, one felt that all was in the balance until the very end.

Hagen Quartet - Schubert, Webern, and Haydn, 22 November 2018

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.

Hagen Quartet/Widmann - Webern, Widmann, and Mozart, 30 January 2018

Wigmore Hall

Webern: String Quartet (1905)

Widmann: Clarinet Quintet (2017, UK premiere)

Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, KV 581

Lukas Hagen (violin), Rainer Schmidt (violin)

Veronika Hagen (viola)

Clemens Hagen (cello)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

 

The Hagen Quartet opened this concert with Webern’s 1905 String Quartet, not a work I can recall ever having heard ‘live’ before, although it has been well treated on disc. (Yes, I remain old-fashioned enough to say that and indeed to listen to recordings.) I was quite taken aback by the frozen, starkly modernistic opening in the Hagens’ performance: not only arresting in itself, but not quite what I should have expected from them. The music certainly warmed; yet, in that warming, it became more, not less, febrile, this fascinating early piece sounding almost as if it were sped-up and, later, slowed down early-ish Schoenberg. It does not – and did not – have the consistency of, say, Schoenberg’s own unnumbered quartet, let alone his four ‘official’ ones, nor indeed his fragments. The Hagens, however, captured very well its unsettled strangeness of style and method, whilst still pointing to those aspects, more than one might initially suspect, that look forward to Webern’s mature works. The unisons, quite rightly, did not ring true, nor the somewhat contrived cadences at the ends of sections. With equal justice, though, the final cadence did, as if a flickering reminiscence of Verklärte Nacht. This seemed to me an object lesson in performance of a problematical work, neither making excuses for it, nor running away from its difficulties.

 

Jörg Widmann joined the players for the rest of the concert, first in his own Clarinet Quintet, here receiving its first British performance, and then in Mozart’s supreme masterpiece of the genre. It is, according to the composer in a programme note, ‘a single 40-minute Adagio in which the initial tempo marking Lento assai could stand as a programme for the entire work. (I say ‘according to’, not because I disbelieve him, but simply because I did not consult my watch.) It is, not unreasonably for a clarinettist composer, something he had long wanted to write, yet, ‘in 2009, my humility and admiration of these masterpieces [the ones you would expect…] brought my life project clarinet quintet to a temporary halt. … Eight years later, in 2017, I returned to my plans.’ Immediately, Widmann continues, he ‘sensed that the long wait had been worth it.’ Without claiming any knowledge of what it would have been like had he continued earlier, I suspect that he was right, for what we heard proved to be a typically accomplished and absorbing reckoning with tradition.

 

That febrile quality heard in much of the Webern performance seemed to continue, indeed to be intensified, in the opening of this long slow(ish) movement, whose overall conception often brought to mind a Brucknerian conception of time, although not, I think, a remotely Brucknerian method. Perhaps, though, there were elements of deformation of an imaginary Bruckner Adagio, for, as is often the case with Widmann’s music, one perceived – or at least I did! – all manner of refractions of ‘original’, Classical-Romantic music, which had most likely never existed in the first place: at least not for us. Mozart, Brahms, perhaps Reger too, also hovered as ghosts in our musical consciousness: sometimes in a phrase, sometimes in a progression, sometimes goodness knows how. Interestingly, in context, some of the results of what appeared to have been a very different conception and process, did not sound so very different from Webern either. Or was that all a matter of my own historical baggage? We all have our Vergangenheitsbewältigung to do, after all, even if some countries are rather more advanced than ours in doing so. (It would hardly be difficult.) Haunted and haunting, just when the music might have seemed in danger of coming too close to a past, even if that past had never been, more recent, even living ghosts, or angels perhaps – Lachenmann, Stockhausen, Rihm? – appeared to join our musical host.

 

Then, through a performative virtuosity that sometimes we are in danger of taking for granted, Widmann suggested (again, at least to me) a glass armonica, perhaps even something older, a mediaevalism. Dactylic meter seemed to evoke Beethoven and Schubert, but did it? You can call that postmodernism if you like, but I do not think it is, not here, not straightforwardly. For there is an overall conception of form, of purpose, that is quite different, to my understanding anyway. At any rate, extended techniques, both in composition and performance, spoke both of a reinvented past as much as present and future. ‘Zum Raum hier wird die Zeit?’ Not really, or not at any rate, as the anti-historical Schopenhauer might have understood Gurnemanz’s words. Wagner, ever a student also of Hegel, knew better, though; so, I think, does Widmann. Ruptures intrigued, as, I fancied, they might have intrigued Adorno. Might a caesura bring back the past? Of course not, but why should it, or rather its composer, not try, knowing, like Mahler with a Luftpause, that he was bound at some level, to fail? The violence of such a rupture nevertheless remained: again, haunted and haunting.

 

A great performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet will, in different yet not mutually opposed ways, possess some of that haunted and haunting quality to us, as twenty-first-century listeners. This did, and I think may genuinely be accounted as ‘great’, or very close thereto. The utter perfection of Mozart’s work shone through. Even if there were occasional things one might have done differently oneself in the abstract – and if so, they were so minor, I have forgotten them – then there was nothing that jarred, nothing that screamed ‘look at me’, nothing that spoke of ‘reassessment’ for the mere sake of reassessment. We seemed, at any rate, to return to an Elysium from which we knew we should soon be expelled once again; or rather, we beheld it, in some sense partook in it, whilst knowing that it was never straightforwardly ours. Such is the particular pain of Mozart’s music, perhaps ever more so with the passing of every year (and his every January birthday).

 

This was as attentive a performance as anyone might have hoped for. Beauty of tone was certainly present, yet expressive, not a mere end in itself. Mozart’s formal concision as well as dynamism shone through, Webern in a sense remaining. And yet so did his command of the longest of lines and the way he plays with expectations: Widmann remained too. The first movement’s development section sounded as rare, as fantastical, as anything in Così fan tutte. Its recapitulation – with apologies to the Guardian journalist who recently declared, ex cathedra, that such talk should be banished from her brave new world of quinoa for all – functioned, or rather was experienced, very much as a second development, a new, wondrous world of wordless dramatic exploration.

 

Hushed equipoise characterised much, although not all, of the slow movement. There was nothing remotely sentimental to it. We were, however, called, drawn in to listen; and listen, I think, we did. Mozart’s music sang as if this were the only way to sing it. It is not, of course, but a sense of absolute ‘rightness’ is no bad thing, however much we know it, in retrospect, to have been relative. The minuet, alive, alert, in some sense again unattainable, contrasted duly, wondrously with its in turn contrasting trios, the one stern, without rupture to kinship, the other breathing the world of a remembered Salzburg serenade. The finale concluded and unified our experience without apparent effort: just as it should sound, however great the actual effort. Its profusion of melodic and, later, harmonic variation were relished with, again, that sense of ineffable ‘rightness’. How did anyone ever dare to write another clarinet quintet after this? We should nevertheless be grateful that some composers have. For if we are to believe in tradition at all, it must never stand still, always develop. Mozart will remain.

Hagen Quartet - Mozart, 28 January 2015

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.20 in D major, KV 499, ‘Hoffmeister’

String Quartet no.21 in D major, KV 575

String Quartet no.22 in B-flat major, KV 589

Lukas Hagen, Rainer Schmidt (violins)

Veronika Hagen (viola)

Clemens Hagen (cello)

 

The first movement of the Hoffmeister Quartet immediately had one aware of Haydn’s influence, though never at the expense of Mozart’s personality. In a commendably flexible reading, the Hagen Quartet made one listen – and such listening would be richly rewarded. Greater intensity was always musically grounded. The development section did what it should: developed – which is far from always the case. Its brevity could be fully respected. Twin imperatives of proportion and goal-orientation were well balanced throughout. The Menuet immediately announced itself as such in its tempo and more broadly in its style. (One knows a minuet when one hears it, and should never trouble oneself with Beckmesser-ish queries about what is ‘correct’.) Discreet portamenti were most welcome, as was the sinuous line of Lukas Hagen’s first violin. A splendidly conversational Allegretto might have sounded fast in isolation, but made perfect sense in relation to what had gone before and what would come after. The slow movement was poised, well shaped, intelligently played; what I missed was greater warmth. Here, the Hagens’ sensibility seemed closer to Haydn, even to early Beethoven, at least at times. Nevetherless, the stature and seriousness of Mozart’s music came across. The developmental quality of the finale was well conveyed. Again, Haydn – here again, in welcome fashion – loomed large but not overwhelmingly. Crucially, we continued to be compelled to listen.

 

Another D major work ensued, the first of Mozart’s ‘Prussian’ quartets, KV 575. From its opening, we were enabled to appreciate its very different character: more ‘operatic’, for want of a better word, the instruments sounding not just as soloists but as characters. Early on, solos from Veronika Hagen’s viola and Clemens Hagen’s cello – this was, after all, written with the cello-playing Frederick William II in mind – proved aurally arresting, but everyone would have his or her say. This is decidedly ‘late’ Mozart, but it was decidedly warm too. There is not a spare note; nor did it sounds as if there were. The Andante likewise proved as tightly-knit as anything in Beethoven, yet such concision proved in no sense at odds with expansive tendencies. The Menuetto similarly combined concision and flow. Its Allegretto rightly relaxing just a little, the cello solo an especial joy. In the finale, we heard again a heightened sense of operatic ‘character’ and conversation, whether à 4, or in almost any combination.

 

The B-flat Quartet, KV 589, offered melodic delight from the outset: above all, of course, from the cello, but far from exclusively so. The many virtues of the two earlier performances were to be heard once again, yet there was equal sensitivity to the particular ‘voice’ of this work. This was certainly no ‘one size fits all’ approach to Mozart. His perfect – I was about to add ‘well-nigh’, and realised there was no need – balance of harmony and counterpoint was again something in which to rejoice; so were the particularities of melody and indeed harmony. A poised, cultivated slow movement followed. Perhaps it was on the cool side when compared with, say, the Amadeus Quartet, but this remained a variegated reading which, crucially, imparted a sense of refined reflection upon the earlier world of Salzburg serenades. There was certainly little to be rued with respect to warmth or sweetness in the Menuetto: pretty much ideal, not just in terms of tone, but also harmonic understanding. A nicely busy trio, with a particularly noteworthy second violin solo from Rainer Schmidt, helped fully realise the Beethovenian scale of this extraordinary movement as a whole. Performance of the finale was learned yet insouciant – like the score itself. It was loved, but not too much.

 

Salzburg Festival (2) – Hagen Quartet: Beethoven, 20 August 2013

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.

Salzburg Festival 2013 - programme fully announced

The programme for the Salzburg Festival in 2013 has now been announced. Gawain and Stefan Herheim's eagerly-awaited Meistersinger (conducted by Daniele Gatti) are surely the operatic highlights. Cycles of the Mahler symphonies and the Beethoven string quartets (from the Hagen Quartet) jostle amongst an embarrassment of concerted riches. Click here for details.

Salzburg Festival (4) - Hagen Quartet: Schubert, 23 August 2011

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

String Quartet in A minor, D 804, ‘Rosamunde’
String Quartet in D minor, D 810, ‘Death and the Maiden’
String Quartet in G major, D 887

Lukas Hagen, Rainer Schmidt (violins)
Veronika Hagen (viola)
Clemens Hagen (cello)


I could well understand the desire to perform Schubert’s final three quartets in the same concert. However, and I know that I was not alone in feeling this, there was a sense of diminishing returns by the end: a little too much of a marathon, to the detriment of the G major quartet, however finely performed. Sweltering heat in Salzburg certainly did not help; the Hagen Quartet could certainly not reasonably be held responsible for that. Nevertheless, I wondered whether performing the three quartets over two concerts, alongside a couple of other pieces, might have worked better.

That said, there was a great deal to admire, from the hushed, disquieting opening of the Rosamunde Quartet onwards. This A minor work received a dark, often violent reading, quite distinct from any complacent notions of the Biedermeier, the threat of fragmentation, especially in the first movement, always present yet never fulfilled. Adorno would surely have approved, for the Second Viennese School was brought even closer than usual to Schubert. The development’s febrile intensity, sometimes under and sometimes above the surface, enabled the recapitulation to emerge less as a return than as a second development, the coda almost as a third, albeit foreshortened and ultimately denied. I was less convinced by the second movement, whose tempo sounded more of an Allegretto than an Andante to me, though I realise that many will consider me terminally old-fashioned in that respect. The full tone of Clemens Hagen’s cello was sometimes undermined by the surprisingly low level (semi-skimmed?) vibrato above. Nevertheless, contrapuntal violence was magnificently achieved later on. The minuet exuded quiet menace. If only an intervening telephone had been quieter still, both here and in the finale. (The ringtone suggested that the culprit was one and the same.) Nevertheless, post-Mozartian grace and clarity – though by now, for Schubert, it is definitively post-Mozartian – enabled the music to smile through tears as well as calls. Mozartian perfection may no longer be possible, but there was a Beethovenian intensity of thematic working out to vie with that wistful necessity-cum-impossibility.

The darkness of Death and the Maiden’s opening rightly occluded the would-be jauntiness of the first movement’s second subject, which in any case would soon be utterly denied. And so, the movement continued: tragedy always having the upper hand, the purpose, if not the language, that of Beethoven. The celebrated slow movement set of variations was passionately tragic, yet never inappropriately so. The cello-led variation was a lyrical joy, though we always knew it could not last, the furious unisons of the ensuing third variation foreshadowing and arguably pre-emptively surpassing Bruckner. There were times, moreover, as in the fifth variation, when the players showed themselves unafraid to unleash a certain degree of ugliness akin to that of the Grosse Fuge. The scherzo’s drive indubitably owed a great deal to Beethoven’s example too, whilst the trio returned us to that post-Mozartian poise, tenderness, and vain hope expressed in the earlier quartet. The finale positioned itself, rightly, between those two tendencies, or rather veered between them, albeit with a lyricism, however strained, that was unmistakeably Schubert’s and Schubert’s alone.

If Bruckner had been occasionally present in the D minor Quartet, he almost became composer-in-residence for parts of the G major, the Seventh Symphony often coming to mind in the first movement’s melodic lines set against tremolos. The Hagens’ shaping of those melodies was of course crucial, and well-nigh faultless, likewise their appreciation of the sheer scale of Schubert’s canvas. That symphonic quality persisted into the slow movement, though melodic snatches and the give-and-take thereby necessitated underpinned the overwhelming motivic force. The scherzo was poised, as it should be, between Beethovenian gruffness and Mendelssohnian lightness, its formidable technical challenges navigated with aplomb, whilst the trio sounded as if a wistful echo of a time when one might still have danced carefree. Schubert’s finale emerged helter-skelter, yet anything but carefree, defiance and vulnerability held in necessarily uneasy confrontation.

Hagen Quartet - Mozart and Schubert, 30 January 2011

Wigmore Hall

Mozart – String Quartet no.16 in E-flat major, KV 428/421b
Schubert – String Quartet no.13 in A minor, D 804, ‘Rosamunde’

Lukas Hagen, Rainer Schmidt (violins)
Veronika Hagen (viola)
Clemens Hagen (violoncello)


What could be more civilised than a couple of great Classical string quartets as a Wigmore Sunday morning Coffee Concert? The present performance formed part of the Hagen Quartet’s thirtieth anniversary series. The Hagens clearly have no intention of resting on their well-deserved laurels, however, for their performance of Mozart’s E-flat quartet, KV 428/421b, seemed determined to undermine the idea of mere ‘civilisation’. Not that there was anything crude, or Romantic; if anything, it proved quite the opposite, exuding a sense of serious restraint. One might argue that such an impression of effort was apposite; Mozart famously struggled to bring all six of his Haydn Quartets to perfection, in a way quite at odds with the general, not entirely unjustified, perception of free inspiration and invention. Yet I am not sure, and was not convinced by this rendition, that ‘effortful’ is every really a word one should apply to Mozart in performance. What I missed was the ‘smile’ that Messiaen so wisely ascribed to Mozart’s music. (The French composer even composed a 1991 anniversary tribute, Un sourire.)

That said, there was much to admire, not least the varied use of vibrato, never dogmatic and clearly well thought out, even if my own taste would be for a slightly higher optimum level. Slightly muted sonorities were perhaps also to a certain extent a product of the work’s tonal frame of reference: E-flat major and its related keys are not the brightest of tonalities on strings. A highlight of the first movement was the sense of exhaustion engendered by the concise development section; all that could be done, now, one felt, was to recapitulate, not that recapitulation is ever merely that in Mozart. The slow movement proved intense, but a little too much like hard work. It was never rushed, though, whereas the minuet was taken surprisingly fast, emerging almost scherzo-like; indeed, its violent streak might have better suited Beethoven. The gentler trio came properly as a contrast, though arguably too great a contrast. Allegro vivace is the finale’s marking. However, I am not sure that its mood, irrespective of speed, really registered as vivace. Again, despite febrile intensity, the overall impression was somewhat effortful. However, there was charm to be heard from a number of Lukas Hagen’s sweet-toned solos.

Such seriousness of purpose seemed better suited to Schubert’s Rosamunde Quartet. A note of tragic lyricism was struck immediately, developing alongside and in between a rhetoric of anger, which nevertheless remained integrated into a structural whole. This was not comforting, consoling Schubert, nor should it be. The fragility of the slow movement’s opening was palpable; though relatively swift, it unsettled. I wondered whether one might hear more here in the way of consolation, however illusory, but the Hagens’ view had a consistency, almost Beethovenian, of its own. Whispered confidences and more ardent responses marked the minuet. This was certainly not to be danced to, but then that was never the intention. If clouds lifted in the finale, then sunshine proved far from unalloyed; there were, rightly, shadows and memories aplenty. The players skilfully trod a tightrope between major-mode transformation and haunting from what had gone before. Where the Mozart performance had intrigued and posed questions, the Schubert sounded more of a convincing, indeed wrenching, whole.

Haydn - Hagen Quartet, 26 November 2008

Wigmore Hall

Haydn – String Quartet in B-flat major, Op.76 no.4, ‘Sunrise’
Haydn – String Quartet in D major, Op.76 no.5
Haydn – String Quartet in E-flat major, Op.76 no.6

Lukas Hagen (violin)
Rainer Schmidt (violin)
Veronika Hagen (violin)
Clemens Hagen (violoncello)

The Wigmore Hall is presenting all of Haydn’s string quartets from Op.20 onwards over its 2008-9 season, a laudable contribution to next year’s bicentenary celebrations. The Hagen Quartet had performed the first three Op.76 quartets the previous evening; here were the last three. These were fine performances indeed, which served to heighten my regret that I had been unable to attend the first concert.

The celebrated ‘sunrise’ opening of no.4 was arrestingly caught, at least as much so upon the exposition repeat: quite an achievement, given that everyone would by then know what to expect. Light vibrato – something mysteriously withheld, as in the ‘Representation of Chaos’ –from the three lower parts contrasted with Lukas Hagen’s rapt first violin solo. Thereafter, the music sprang into Haydnesque life. I marvelled anew at the concision of the exposition, indeed of the first movement as a whole, and appreciated once again how this music truly represents a conversation of equals. Haydn’s quartets are so much more than this, but they remain music of supreme civilisation: monuments to the most noble aspirations of the Enlightenment. The life with which the Hagens invested their performance put me in mind of a passage from Furtwängler’s notebooks, ‘I have always devoted a great deal of thought to the word vital. It is a word of intellectuals for intellectuals … Mozart and Beethoven are not vital, but simply beautiful, great, good, what they want to be. What highly praised modern art expresses: Vitalität.’ I am not entirely sure that I agree with Furtwängler, but the important point is that there was no secondary Vitalität here, but the inner life of the music allowed Haydn simply to be and to speak for himself. ‘Imitative’ entries were never merely imitative; they always brought something new and thereby found their place in the work as it developed over time. The purity of tone with which the Adagio opened epitomised the (neo-)Classical ideal, as trumpeted by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, of ‘noble simplicity and calm greatness’. Yet even more important was the sense of ongoing development, edging towards the Schoenbergian ideal of developing variation. The players were flexible, though never lax. Their attention to dynamic distinctions, especially in the lower dynamic range, was most praiseworthy in its expressive consequences. The minuet was fast – it is marked Allegro – but not rushed. Nor was it inflexible, as can often be the case in modern performances of eighteenth-century music; indeed, it evinced a winning swing. The trio, by contrast, was splendidly rustic, almost Bartókian at the extraordinary drone opening. If I had minor reservations, they related to the finale, in which the opening sounded a touch too delicately manicured: Furtwängler’s Vitalität perhaps trumped life. The B-flat minor episode might have benefited from a touch more Sturm und Drang, yet the Hagens’ relative restraint ensured that mere ‘effect’ was not the order of the day. And the precision with which the movement gathered momentum was mesmerising, even if it were bought at the expense of an equally valid wildness.

Lukas Hagen once again made his mark on the very opening of no.5, imprinting the ease of its siciliano rhythm upon our – and the quartet’s – consciousnesses. I was struck by the true sense of discovery, almost Newtonian, as the movement’s tonal plan unfolded; modulations were always infused with the greatest understanding and meaning. Once again, all parts teemed with life. The rare – in every sense – F-sharp major tonality of the slow movement ensured, along with the performance, that this would be the still centre of the work. The Hagens drew upon a seemingly infinite dynamic palette with extraordinary expressive care. Every modulation was an event yet also part of a greater plan: shades again of the Newtonian universe as celebrated in Haydn’s own Creation. This movement was, quite simply, sublime: in an eighteenth-century and a modern sense. A graceful minuet followed, underlining the care with which the players distinguished apparently ‘similar’ movements in different works. Clemens Hagen relished his especial opportunity to shine in the trio. With the moto perpetuo of the finale, we moved into an almost Figaro-like world of joy: fun, lively, but never breathless. (Think Colin Davis rather than those who would subject Classical music to the perverse indignities currently favoured in some quarters.)

The sixth Op.76 quartet is perhaps the crown of the set, although every work remains of course a jewel. Its first movement was characterised by a well-nigh perfect combination of delicacy and intellectual control. Haydn displayed to us his learning and his wit. So did the performers: both his and theirs. Bach inevitable came to mind, and not only in the final, fugal variation. The second movement brought both warmth of initial tonality and a splendidly exploratory nature to the subsequent tonal plan. Some modulations sounded almost Schubertian in their heart-stopping magic: such tonal daring! The minuet was properly scherzo-like (it is marked Presto), exuding a great sense of fun, not least in the danger and precision of its skipping intervals. This music truly looked forward to Beethoven. The mastery of both composer and performers was once again displayed in the trio’s counterpoint. And with the reprise of the minuet, the wit of slight agogic exaggerations reminded us that the music should not sound quite the same the second time around. The final Allegro spiritoso was just that: an archetypal ‘Haydn finale’. Rhythmic and harmonic momentum were as one. The surprising loud chords of the development section were expertly judged in their voicing. Both composer and performers played with our expectations – and won, hands down.