Jerusalem Quartet - Mozart, Prokofiev, and Brahms - 30 May 2023

Wigmore Hall

Mozart: String Quartet no.21 in D major, KV 575
Prokofiev: String Quartet no.2 in F major, Op.92
Brahms: String Quartet no.1 in C minor, op.51 no.1

Alexander Pavolvsky, Sergei Bressler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

 

A wonderful concert from beginning to end. The Jerusalem Quartet treated Mozart as he should be treated: the players’ tone rich and cultivated. Opening tone would not have been taken for the Amadeus Quartet, yet would surely have been recognised by them. Fineness of tone was certainly no end in itself, though; it enlivened and enabled Mozart’s structures from the first movement onward in coming to life as form. There was rhetoric, where required, but this again was properly integrated, not as far too often a substitute for formal communication. For above all, every phrase was imbued with a sense of life and was formally directed. The cliché of the Classical string quartet as conversation may be too worn by now, but it seemed born anew, rejuvenated by a true sense of the operatic solo, duet, trio, and of course quartet. The Andante breathed the evening air of Mozart’s Salzburg serenades, albeit refracted through a late(r) combination of the vital and the reflective: Così-like, one might say. Kyril Zlotnikov eagerly rose to the regal challenge of Frederick William II’s part: first among equals; or, as his uncle might have had it, first servant of the ensemble. That was all the more so in a stylish minuet, propelled both harmonically and rhythmically, both of the eighteenth century and peering beyond it. Brief withdrawal of vibrato in the finale, for expressive rather than dogmatic reasons, made its point in an account as full of life as I have ever heard. Intimations of Beethoven were clear, emerging from score and performance in the most natural, effortless way imaginable. 

The first movement of Prokofiev’s Second Quartet sounded strikingly folk-influenced, which was not to say folklike (an important distinction, I think, both in work and performance). Origins, putative or imaginary, were relished and yet transformed into something new. Prokofiev trademarks were all there: melodic profusion, side-slipping, even the occasional grotesquerie of old, in a performance that evidently relished the composer, his language, and his individual approach to this hallowed genre. A rapt, even visionary opening to the central Adagio emerged from the intensity of the players’ encounter with the score. The second section’s oddball humour came as release, final darkness offering similarly consequent contrast. The finale likewise emerged out of, yet also in, its predecessor’s shadows, in almost operatic fashion, perhaps filmic too. One could almost see the scenes, of whatever kind, the music might have portrayed—not unlike, say, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Superficial similarities with Bartók served mostly – rightly, in my view – to underline how different his music is. Zlotnikov’s extraordinary cadenza incited a truly impassioned climax from all, before the composer led them on a quite different path – how typical of him – to conclusion. 

Taut urgency, not least in more lyrical passages, was apparent from the outset of Brahms’s First Quartet. One felt his struggle in the first movement and beyond, not least his struggle with Beethoven, motivic and otherwise. This is C minor, after all. The intensity of its close was as if I had never heard it before, prior to subsiding to the uneasiest of peace. There was more rapt, if far from untroubled, lyricism to be heard in Brahms’s second movement. Arguably more idiomatic than Prokofiev’s, it is certainly more typical, if such writing can ever truly be considered ‘typical’. Haunted by a host of German Romantic ghosts, musical and perhaps extramusical, it now placed Schubert first among equals. If that were decidedly ambiguous consolation, the post-Schumann darkness of the scherzo led in the opposite direction, to a chiaroscuro the more wondrous the closer one listened. Its trio offered relief of sorts, yet such relief was immediately complicated, not least metrically, presenting Haydn as an ‘as if…’. Further turns of the screw in the finale ushered in a torrential and ultimately tragic outpouring of absolute finality. 

As an encore, the Adagio from Haydn’s String Quartet in F minor, op.20 no.5, provided sunny contrast, albeit a ray of winter sunshine on the cusp of spring. Poise proved the key, rather than a contrast, to its expressive riches.

Jerusalem Quartet - Beethoven, 31 March 2022

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.3 in D major, op.18 no.3
String Quartet no.9 in C major, op.59 no.3, ‘Razumovsky’
String Quartet no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.131

Alexander Pavlovsky

Sergei Bressler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

Half-way through the Jerusalem Quartet’s survey of the (canonical) Beethoven string quartets, and there was no sign of flagging, whether from players or audience. The performances we heard at the Wigmore Hall were as full of energy as ever, even arguably on occasion (as in the finale to the third Razumovsky Quartet) to excess. One can, of course, argue about this or that interpretative choice. No single set of performances will please everyone all the time; no single performance will, for that matter. There is no gainsaying, though, the outstanding playing, nor the sense of discovery and achievement throughout. 

As with previous accounts of quartets from op.18, the Jerusalem Quartet captured very well the post-Mozartian qualities of D major Quartet, op.18 no.3: influence, even debt, yet also a knowledge that it is too late, even for Beethoven, to be Mozart. Their first-movement questions and responses were not only conversational, though that was a striking quality of the exposition in particular, but also teleologically directed through motivic process. An almost crazily intense development section led to the recapitulation having Beethoven’s material rise phoenix-like from the ashes left behind. All this was heard—played—as if in a single breath. Neither here nor elsewhere was there a hint of the condescension some visit on ‘early’ Beethoven. The Andante con moto was full of character, born of detail and that longer-term hearing. The harmonic role of Kyril Zlotnikov’s cello became all the more apparent here as enabler and propeller; then so too did that of the other instruments, for harmonic miracles were also effected above an unchanging bass. Once more, there was great intensity to the climax. A scherzo and trio with all the tension of a coiled spring still had space where required. Concision here was the watchword. The Presto finale proved full of incident, ever surprising. A keen sense was conveyed of the harmonic and other implications, of varying phrase length, especially prolongation. Helter-skelter, yet with ultimately disciplined freedom and once more clear sight of the goal, here was Beethoven as Haydn’s pupil. 

A grave introduction to the C major ‘Razumovsky’ Quartet, op.59 no.3, may initially have sounded a little understated, but not at all; when the exposition proper burst forth, all fell into place, a strong sense of necessity present and correct. Every note of this first movement seemed relished as if new. An almost Mendelssohn-like, elfin quality to development—not only the development section—was set in productive contrast with a dogged insistence that could only have been Beethoven’s, especially when returning us to the tonic. Likewise, no note was taken for granted in a second movement whose strangeness—cello arco almost as much as outsize pizzicato—fully registered. Flexible, yet ever coherent, this account knew where it was going; it took us there with rawness of emotion and no little charm, revealed to be two sides of that same coin of necessity. An ultimate sense of melancholy, both constructed and ‘natural’, stood not so far from Mendelssohn either. A graceful, euphonious minuet found energetic release in a still spacious yet directed trio. Was the finale, surely the fastest I have ever heard, too fast? Notes were fairly flung off all strings in a performance as hard driven as it was intense, but this, worlds away from the Beethoven of the Quartetto Italiano, was clearly how the players heard it. It worked, to evident audience delight, though nagging doubts remained on my part. 

The C-sharp minor Quartet, op.131, rightly sounded more remote in tonality, the players showing little interest in equalising their temperament for an opening that took us to another world. Neither sweetness nor harshness was smoothed over in a performance with roots—ironically?—in Bach, yet whose longing seemed to take us all the way to Wagner’s Schopenhauerian reflections. We do not usually speak nowadays of ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ music, largely with good reason, but perhaps in such cases we should. Not that that implies a lack of emotional depth, quite the contrary, but rather the impossibility of considering, let alone expressing that other than musically. No wonder Wagner, so often the connoisseur of quartet writing, described this Adagio as ‘the saddest thing ever said in notes’. The second movement grew out of the first, rendering its transformation of mood, tonality included, all the more moving; we knew its fragility as well as its necessity. The strange recitative of the third movement was heard with a rapt sublimity and yet humanity suggestive of angels en famille rather than approaching the throne of the Almighty. 

A dizzying array of procedures was perfectly moulded into a greater whole for the variations that followed. Again, words seem to fail; mine certainly have. Is this ‘difficult’ music? One could hardly argue otherwise, and yet score and performance alike drew one in to listen, cajoled and even compelled one to make an effort that was richly rewarded. The scherzo offered a heavenly wildness—or should that be a wild heavenliness?—that also spoke, however unfashionable it might be to say so, of the sheer moral goodness that lies for so many of us at the heart of Beethoven’s voice. Suffused with sadness, the sixth movement initiated the journey back to C-sharp minor, for a finale whose tragedy was rooted in experience, but not resignation. Here, once more, Beethoven spoke with, to, and for humanity, in all its fractures, hopes, and ultimate greatness.

Jerusalem Quartet - Beethoven (2), 16 February 2022

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.2 in G major, op.18 no.2
String Quartet no.8 in E minor, op.59 no.2
String Quartet no.13 in B-flat major, op.130, with Grosse Fuge, op.133

Alexander Pavolvsky, Sergei Bressler (violins)
Jonathan Brown (viola)
Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

For the second in its series of five concerts offering the complete (canonical) Beethoven quartets, the Jerusalem Quartet followed its programming practice in the first. Whereas last month, we heard the first of the ‘early’, the first of the ‘middle-period’, and the first of the ‘late’ quartets, here we heard the second in each category, a satisfying and thoughtful alternative to either a strictly chronological survey or one that combined the works according to other criteria. One surprise change was that of the violist; Ori Kam had fallen ill and been replaced by the excellent Jonathan Brown, doubtless to the relief of all concerned. 

The G major Quartet, op.18 no.2, opened with Mozartian grace. One of the questions to be asked in the movement as a whole, and to a certain extent throughout the work, was the degree to which that would prove recognisably post-Mozartian. An infectious vitality, perhaps already with a tiny hint that what was possible for Mozart was no longer for Beethoven, informed and animated what we heard. (A nagging voice reminds me of Furtwängler’s words: ‘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 quite so sure, but never mind.) At any rate, this was fresh playing, unburdened by any such doubts, suggesting (almost) a whole career ahead for the composer. A truly startling development section surprised, even when one ‘knew’ or thought one did, nothing taken for granted. So too did a developing recapitulation, Haydn’s pupil excelling himself with timing of surprises. The Adagio cantabile progressed with that somewhat complex grace characteristic of early Beethoven slow movements, interrupted by a kinetic outpouring almost ‘late’ in quality. The relationship may be less fractured, but the shock, again even when one knew, nonetheless made us listen. It came to rest of a sort, necessitating the scherzo in a not entirely dissimilar relationship. Full of youthful energy and again full of surprises, the performance displayed Beethoven’s character and resourcefulness—that transition back to scherzo from trio, for instance—to excellent effect.  The finale was clearly in Haydn’s line, that crucial issue of character well judged. Yet its waywardness, wilfulness, and even wildness were heard to be unmistakeably Beethoven’s own. Tonal jumps and slides were good-humoured yet not without edge. And how it developed! 

Rhetorical drama between different material and tendencies was brought to the fore in the first movement of the second Razumovsky Quartet. The Jerusalem Quartet deployed a palette with a broad array of dynamic contrasts, yes, but so much more besides: attack, articulation, bowing, vibrato, and so on, a masterclass in string playing. This is not easy music, but nor was it rendered obscure, concision and direction key to that achievement, as scale and scope were rendered thrillingly immediate. The slow movement sounded initially simpler, more songful, at least on the surface, yet so much more lay beneath—and increasingly, on the surface too. It received an eloquent, deeply moving performance, sublimity earned, not assumed. There will have been more ‘beautiful’ accounts, yet few more truthful. Here was Beethoven craggy, scowling, and, dare I suggest, morally strenuous. Obstreperous yet, again, good-natured, the Allegretto third movement admitted of no easy answers, at times veering almost towards ‘late’ enigma. Its trio sounded as strange as I can recall, suggestive of Bartók, Janáček, and Schoenberg. The sign-off, when it came, was splendidly laconic. The finale was almost a world in itself, quizzical yet determined, also experienced as necessary release from what had preceded it. Victory was not easily won, but the keener for it. 

The first movement of the op.130 Quartet had difficulty speak for itself, with no need to highlight. Emotionally honest, with an inwardness through and even in the fractures, it always permitted of consolation as alternative to the abyss. In the second movement, what initially seemed understated became still more extreme. Its Presto speed was part, yet only part, of that. A fine, necessary balance was struck between the horizontal and vertical in the ever-mysterious third movement, its processes not only audible but well-nigh visible. Excellent democracy between all four players was crucial. The fourth movement emerged almost as if a mirror image, inverted, of its predecessor, yet moved in quite a different direction, properly disorienting. The ‘Cavatina’, resolutely unsentimental yet certainly not without sentiment, was heard less with hushed awe—there were occasional passages—than at an unashamedly human level: warm to the extent of passion, and ultimately straightforward. No one would accuse the Grosse Fuge of that, but it struggled heroically toward the all-encompassing: tentative and strident; looking back (to Mozart as much as Bach) as well as forward; forbidding and deeply sympathetic; through lenses of Goethe and Schiller; via Heaven, Hell, and ultimately the playfulness of Earth too. This was Beethoven’s richly divine comedy.

 

Jerusalem Quartet - Beethoven, 29 January 2022

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.1 in F major, op.18 no.1
String Quartet no.7 in F major, op.59 no.1
String Quartet no.12 in E-flat major, op.127

Alexander Pavolvsky, Sergei Bressler (violins)
Ori Kam (viola)
Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

We lost so much in 2020: above all, the lives of people across the world, more than 70,000 in this country alone. Even if the deaths were to stop right now—they will not—the trauma as well as the long-term physical consequences will haunt many of us for the rest of our lives. The social and cultural consequences seem likely in anything other than the longest term, notwithstanding hopes that may have been expressed, to be deeply negative too. As we try to rebuild our lives and our ways of living, stymied at all points by those wielding power over us, we continue to grieve the loss of Beethoven in his anniversary year. The world went deaf to his music, to all music, and stands only at the beginning of an eminently reversible process of recovery. Beethoven’s music has long been synonymous with hope. To begin 2022, then, with a series of his string quartets from so fine an ensemble as the Jerusalem Quartet offers hope, meaning, and the prospect of spiritual nourishment when still we need it most. 

All of that would be to no avail, of course, were the performances not illuminating. This first instalment suggested strongly that they would be. There is no one way to play Beethoven: what would be the point of choosing between Furtwängler and Klemperer, Pollini and Barenboim, the Busch Quartet and the Végh? We need not, should not, and in this case heard something creditably determined, however illusory the idea, to permit Beethoven’s music to take new directions, not for their own sake, but simply by virtue of particular musicians taking, being inspired by, and rejoicing in decisions they took, in a particular place in front of a particular audience at a particular time. We have no way of knowing what they might have done in 2020, or what they will do in 2027. More to the point, we had no interest. Beethoven, music-making, and music-listening were back—and, as violist Ori Kam said at the beginning, it was a wonderful thing to see the Wigmore Hall full once again. 

The first programme offered three quartets: one early, one middle-period, and one late, to my mind a better or at least more interesting idea than taking them in chronological order, not least since one cannot assume listeners will attend more than one concert. In this case, moreover, we heard the first (of those recognised as canonical), the first of the middle period, and the first of the late period. Conventional periodisation is only part of the story, of course, but what better way to hear how that might be deconstructed, or at least questioned, than by such a programming construction? 

The F major Quartet, op. 18 no.1, immediately set up a number of dialectical oppositions (and potential unities), always the best evidence that we have reached the territory of the Hegel of Music. Quizzical yet certain in its direction, open to possibility yet inevitable, urgent yet expansive, this first movement showed composer and performers alike flexing their muscles and simply delighting in music, both in general and in particular. (The audience seemed to do so too, for that matter.) The intensity of the opening of its development section set out a stall to develop, and to develop as Beethoven; the threat, though only the threat, of chaos both led inevitably to the moment of return and kept us on the edge of our seats. The ‘Adagio affetuoso ed appassionato’ had a sad tread rather than trudge, its pathos rooted in harmony and counterpoint rather than applied to them, its contours, melodic, harmonic, and emotional, authoritatively traced. Vibrato was varied, especially by violins, to highly expressive effect. There followed a true scherzo, airborne yet grounded, gruffly humorous yet serious of purpose. Cross-rhythms delighted in themselves and propelled its progress. The trio called all into question and confirmed it. Perhaps similarly, the finale gathered up a good few of the aforementioned threads and unpicked a few more. It is not an easy movement, but I wondered whether there might have been here a clearer sense of direction. Better an enigma, though, than any attempt to smooth its edges. It was full of winning surprises. 

With the advent of the first ‘Razumovsky’ Quartet, in the same key, mastery had long since been proved. ‘So now what?’ we were asked. Beethoven’s ease with the genre and the imperative to expand it played out with welcome humour, the tonal universe his oyster of exploration. Paradoxically perhaps, there was at times a greater Classicism here than earlier on, the first movement development’s counterpoint neither too effortful nor too effortless. Above all, once more, it developed. Moreover, the moment of return had an almost Mozartian rightness to it, though the joy of further development was to come. The second movement offered an absorbing, involving narrative, singular yet characteristic (not only of movements from a similar mould in Beethoven, but also of early Romantics such as Schubert and Mendelssohn). The temperature of clashes in motivic working out was entirely Beethoven’s own. And the players’ suavity of sign-off spoke of unmistakeable, unquestionably merited confidence. The slow movement’s richness of outpouring was grief-struck yet remarkably varied, the closer one listened. Eloquent, with no easy answers, it was the archetypal Beethovenian journey. Following a finely judged transition, the finale proffered transformation of mood that was yet rooted in what we had heard before. Sunny yet stormy, it restored or rather renewed that vital good humour. 

Following the interval, we heard op.127 in E-flat major. The sound of those E-flat chords announced something very different: not only tonal relief, though certainly the contrast was welcome, but also a different, if related, compositional world. The paradox and/or dialectic of the terse and the expansive, of Romanticism and (neo-)Classicism was immediately apparent in the first movement, ‘late’ pressure toward fragmentation likewise unmistakeable. Here, if one does not sense an enigma, an intellectual struggle, one is doing it wrong (or the performers are). We were in good hands, though. The variations of the second movement, still more so its theme, seemed to take their leave from the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Benedictus’ of the Missa solemnis. This was holy ground, without undue preciosity. The transformations of the third and fourth variations spoke as if directly from Beethoven to us: a little crotchety, as it were, yet with ineffably good-humoured eloquence; complex, yet with a mediated simplicity that enabled us to appreciate the wonders of that complexity. In that, they functioned as keys to unlock the form and meaning of the whole—and not only of this movement. The scherzando’s quizzical concision, possessed necessarily both of fragility of strength, prepared the way for a trio according the impression of turning material upside down and inside out, in a battle more overt yet allied. Webern would surely have understood. As, I think, would Schoenberg the unquestionably ‘late’ willpower exercised in the finale to make its material cohere. It was an intellectual effort, yes, undeniably so, but at least as much an emotional one. And what material, what will, what character this is. In a heterodox Haydn-cum-Bartók finale, Beethoven transcended both.

Jerusalem Quartet - Bartók, 8 May 2019

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.1

String Quartet no.3

String Quartet no.5

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

This was the first of two concerts in which the Jerusalem Quartet would perform Bartók’s six string quartets. If there were slight frustration in my only being able to hear the first, it surely augured well for the second, which I look forward to hearing about, if not, alas, to hearing.

The particular, sometimes competing demands of early Bartók can prove difficult to bring off: no such problem here, in as fine a performance of the First Quartet (1908-9) as I can recall hearing. The opening chromaticism of the violin-duo opening signalled a strongly Schoenbergian presence: one, I think, that endured throughout the quartet and beyond it. For it was not only in the score, though there it certainly was; it was played as such, too, intense yet variegated, in an unmistakeably Austro-Hungarian performance. The Jerusalem Quartet players showed keen ears – and a keen collective ear – for form and structure, expressed without didacticism, born from and living through the notes and their connections. Contrapuntal procedures were invested with dynamism both intellectual and emotional. And how each instrument came into its own through that! New possibilities were signalled and taken in the second movement, which struck a fine balance at its opening between emergence from what had gone before contrast therewith. The finale brought to life a rhetorical disjuncture that had something of Beethoven to it: not in the banal sense of sounding ‘like’ Beethoven’s music, but in spirit, in reinvention. Bartók’s music already seemed to presage the world of Bluebeard, its dramatic flight a product of fierce conviction in performance.

If that final movement, even in the strongest performance such as this, seems nonetheless to go on a little, no one could seriously make such a claim concerning the Third Quartet (1927). Tonality here seemed less on the verge of suspension than beside the point – until it was otherwise. It was certainly motivic working above all that afforded the dynamism in this performance of the opening ‘Prima partie’: dialectical motivic working, that is, in the line of Bach and Beethoven. The music’s emotional intensity somehow seemed both greater and more sparing: surely testament to Bartók’s mastery of form and genre by this stage in his career. The slow-fast ‘Hungarian’ relationship of the first two movements likewise seemed brought to perfection: internalised and thus the more meaningfully expressed. The ‘Recapitulazione della prima parte’ sounded, rightly, not so much as reconciliation but as arbiter and moulder of memory. It was as new as it was old, paving the way for an explosive coda section, as richly developmental within its concise frame as the score from which this magnificent performance sprang.

The Fifth Quartet (1934) had the second half to itself. That uncompromising intensity, intellect and emotion as one, characteristic of both works so far persisted, reinvented itself here too in its first movement and beyond. The players afforded the first subject – I think we can safely call it that – great detail without the slightest suspicion of fussiness, strokes broad, fine, even both, or so it seemed. A pale delirium, increasingly less pale, characterised the response: just as involving, quietly and less quietly generative. Disjuncture and coherence, melodic line and complexity played out in a fashion that perhaps inevitably brought late Beethoven to mind. It made me long to hear the Jerusalem Quartet in Ligeti too. How strange the final poco allargando phrase sounded, yet also how right. I loved the sense imparted in the following ‘Adagio molto’ of a somewhat disoriented and disorienting hymn. (Again, Beethoven’s precedent seemed fruitfully, never oppressively, immanent.) It is ‘night music’, of course, but far more than that. So too is the fourth movement, whose harmony likewise remained fundamental in a not un-Classical way, very much providing a sense of the celebrated Bartókian arch. In between, the scherzo had held harmony, melody, and yes, of course metre in fruitful, riveting dialogue: Haydn for the 1930s. It was Beethoven’s ghost that again lightly haunted the finale, titanic effort to wield material together amply rewarded. But if there were unanimity of purpose, there was equally fierce independence of instrumental voice within that purpose and progress. For work, ensemble, and performance alike, this was emphatically a string quartet.

Jerusalem Quartet: Haydn, 12 February 2018

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet in C major, op.33 no.3, ‘The Bird’

String Quartet in D major, op.64 no.5, ‘The Lark’
String Quartet in G major, op.77 no.1

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

 

Haydn surprises with the unexpected, whereas Mozart surprises with the expected. As with all rules of thumb, there are exceptions, sometimes important enough to have one rethink the entire generalisation. (I remain convinced that I read it once in HC Robbins Landon, yet have been unable to find the source. Please do let me know if you know!) There was no doubting, however, the ‘surprises’, however well one ‘knew’ them already, revealed in the tension of the opening of the first movement to the C major Quartet, op.33 no.3, often known as ‘The Bird’. Indeed, the Jerusalem Quartet’s performance occasionally put me in mind of Bartók. Chirping was no mere tone-painting, of course, but musically generative, just as it would be in the music of the later composer. Throughout, sonata form emerged from and through the musical material and its development, not least the jolt of the recapitulation opening in so unexpected – yes – a key. Tone was varied, at times verging even upon the relatively astringent; there was always, however, a musical justification for what we heard. The throwaway ending was, rightly, possessed of a knowledge that comedy is not only a laughing matter. The ensuing scherzo was heard with a strange, straightforward, almost Beethovenian simplicity and sincerity. Surprises galore followed, with a concision beyond even that of the first movement. The slow movement was taken swiftly indeed, but it worked. If its beginnings seemed again sometimes to hint at Beethoven, the path taken proved quite different. A modulation one can surely only call Schubertian was judged in performance to perfection, telling on account of its integration. Motivic integrity and invention were revealed truly as the agents of comedic drama in a finale that did just what it should, when it should, how it should – without that ever implying there to be no other way.

 

However much there is of Haydn’s music, it is always different. Only to a ear that does not, cannot, listen, will it ever sound ‘the same’. The ‘Lark’ Quartet showed that very well, both as work and as performance. Here, interestingly, the players’ general tone was somewhat different: more modern, even Romantic, although there was certainly nothing anachronistic to it. The contrast with the earlier quartet could only be described as fruitfully dialectical. One size never fits all; there was no attempt to make it do so here. I also noticed immediately how the mood of the first movement’s marking ‘Allegro moderato’ had been captured; tempo is never just, or even principally, about speed. Throughout, an almost Mozartian joy in counterpoint told for itself. The slow movement, here placed second, was again on the swift side for an Adagio but was undoubtedly cantabile. That songfulness was full of integrated incident, worlds away from any lazy all-purpose ‘lyricism’ and all the better for it. The Minuet, again in character as much as mere crotchets per minute, was very much of the allegretto variety. Counterpoint was lightly worn yet generative; so too was the humour of expectation. A Haydn finale, if ever there were one, followed, its moto perpetuo no mere display but musically necessary. Again, counterpoint proved the agent of joy, and vice versa.

 

Following the interval, a performance of the op.77 no.1 quartet breathed the initial sprit of opera buffa, blossoming into ‘purely musical’ delight. The first movement’s tonal structure proved as well judged in performance as in the score, the development’s first modulation the gateway to an exploration such as, one felt, Haydn had never quite conducted before. After The Creation, before The Seasons, he still had so much to say, so many new tonal relations to explore. Beethoven again came frequently to mind in the Adagio, some passages even suggesting his later quartets. The music sang with, through an intellectual complexity that was anything but forbidding; it could hardly have been more inviting. There were surprises galore again in the minuet – a Presto scherzo in all but name – and its trio, the world of the Razumovsky Quartets again close, yet never quite to be confused with what we heard. Invention and wisdom proved quite undimmed in the finale. The minuet from the ‘Sunrise’ Quartet, op.76 no.4, proved a splendid choice of encore, the humour with which its own surprises told as infectious as anything heard earlier. How could anyone not love Haydn?

Jerusalem Quartet/Kam - Beethoven, Bartók, and Brahms, 17 June 2016

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – String Quartet no.6 in B-flat major, op.18 no.6

Bartók – String Quartet no.3
Brahms – Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op.115

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

Sharon Kam (clarinet)

 

This proved to be another excellent concert in the Jerusalem Quartet’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations. The final quartet from Beethoven’s op.18 set opened in immaculate, fizzing post-Haydn and post-Mozart style, judging so well the debts to both composers, as well as the undeniable originality of their challenger. The first movement’s exposition was possessed of great energy, its ‘repeat’ – something of a misnomer in a properly dynamic performance such as this – still more so. The second group thus sounded (both times) all the more contrasted, especially melting the second time around. Announcing the development’s opening phrase with Beethovenian brusqueness, the players nevertheless acknowledged once again the composer’s inheritance from Haydn – who, after all, could be a little terse himself – in several respects, not least motivic working. The recapitulation’s concision was striking; so was the reality that everything, even when, especially when, it seemed the same, had changed. The slow movement was as serene, as disturbing, as full of mystery as its counterpart in, say, a Mozart piano concerto, never more so than when it moved into the minor mode. This was, initially, the Beethoven of the operatic scena, a quality captured to near perfection here. With the return to the tonic, however, invention and joy were as ‘purely’ instrumental as one might imagine. Syncopations were relished in all their generative glory in the scherzo. The trio likewise hit just the right note: trying to relax, yet never quite being able to do so.

‘La Malincolia’ is Beethoven’s marking for the Adagio introduction to the finale. Its indubitably melancholic fragility looked forward, without exaggeration, to the world of the late quartets, not least in the rarity of the air it breathed. The passion characterising the music that ensued, in the Allegretto quasi Allegro, had an almost Schubertian quality to it, punctuated by the fondest of glances back to the music of Beethoven’s eighteenth-century precursors. Insistence, subtly marked out in performance, left one in no doubt that this was Beethoven. Likewise the musical interruptions, the strange turns the music took: perhaps born of, yet never reducible to, the example of Haydn. The players left one in no doubt of their consummate command of idiom and, dare I suggest, meaning.

 

Bartók has as good a claim as any to be the greatest of all successors to Beethoven in this genre. It would, at any rate, have been impossible to dissent from such a view in the light of this performance. The Prima parte of the Third Quartet opened in properly disconcerting fashion, at least for a few bars or so, followed by a slight thaw, followed by a glance back, or an intensification: so the music’s multiple dialectics began to develop. Lest that sound unduly abstract – I am not sure one can be unduly abstract in this of all Bartók’s quartets, but anyway – there was genuine anger to be heard too, then withdrawal. This was Bartók at his most radical, his greatest. Concision and mood swings suggested Beethoven’s example – perhaps even something of Webern too, although most likely qualities in common rather than ‘influence’. There was certainly no denying that every note counted: in itself, horizontally, and vertically.

 

The Seconda parte, quite properly, both emerged from and announced its difference from what had gone before. Something akin to tonality advanced a claim, all the more touching for the combination of strength of assertion and equivocal success. What could be more Beethovenian than the protean dynamism we heard here? The so-called Ricapitulazione della prima parte and Coda proved both questing and questioning, with a sadness all their own. Glassy, febrile passages almost suggested Ligeti, and yet they were thoroughly integrated with neo-Lisztian transformation of the ‘Hungarian’: another description that raises more questions than it answers. What music this is!

 

Sharon Kam joined the players for the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in the second half. The two violins of Alexander Pavlovksy and Sergei Bresler immediately announced a different world, of Viennese sweetness, melancholy, and melancholy in sweetness, with all the painful lateness and distance that are Brahms’s own. That distance was intensified by the entries of the other players, not least the parallel or successor announcement of what might be at stake by Ori Kam and Kyril Zlotnikov, on viola and cello. Kam entered, seemingly more a mediator than a ‘soloist’, or rather no ‘mere’ soloist. The motivic complexity of Brahms’s writing is inescapable here. (Why should anyone wish to escape it?) So too, however, was its good-natured quality – still, perhaps, grasping Mozart’s mantle. On the other hand, there were times when we sounded but a stone’s throw from Verklärte Nacht. There were to come some exquisite, yes soloistic, whisperings from the clarinet, especially in the development section of this first movement, whose optimistic exhaustion, if I may call it that, put me in mind of Mendelssohn. The recapitulation sounded more autumnal, yet also more intense, not least motivically: such is the dynamism of form, of developing variation. A well-nigh Beethovenian climax truly surprised and truly fulfilled, after which the players sang with the truest of melancholy.

 

The Adagio sounded ‘later’ still, which I think it probably is. Its exhaustion was nevertheless the setting for rare solo gems indeed (not just from the clarinet, by any means), in which ghosts of the Viennese past were to be encountered, even welcomed. Nevertheless, it was the clarinet which, rightly, emerged as first among equals, Kam’s arabesques both free and yet laden down with the accumulated weight of tradition that Brahms felt so keenly. Post-Beethovenian serenity vied with anticipations of Schoenberg: layer upon layer. The third movement, by way of relative contast, sounded summery (if still ‘late’ summery). Motivic integrity and fascination remained as great as ever; there was nothing comfortable to what we heard, underlying agitation suggestive again both of Beethoven and of Schoenberg. The finale sounded wonderfully ambivalent, ambiguous. Once more, every note counted, just as it had in the Bartók Quartet, but the sense of tragedy here was almost Mozartian, all the more poignant for knowing that it never quite would or could be.

 

Jerusalem Quartet - Beethoven and Bartók, 16 May 2016

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – String Quartet no.2 1 in G major, op.18 no.2

Bartók – String Quartet no.6

Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

 

Bartók’s string quartets are surely as close to the equivalents for the twentieth century of Beethoven’s quartets to the nineteenth as any works for the medium not by Beethoven could be. I should be tempted to add ‘Discuss’; however, in the midst of exam season, the last thing I want is any more essays to mark. Let us take that, then, as read, and say that nothing could be more apt for the Jerusalem Quartet’s celebration of its twentieth anniversary than a series in which it combines works by Beethoven and Bartók.

 

In this BBC Lunchtime Concert at the Wigmore Hall, Beethoven’s G major Quartet, op.18 no.2, came first. The first movement opened with a typically cultivated sound and, just as important, a true sense of life in the music. This was recognisably post-Mozart, post-Haydn, but with some emphasis on the ‘post-’ too, not least in the accents and insistency of Kyril Zlotnikov’s  cello part, soon echoed elsewhere, for instance by Alexander Pavolovsky’s first violin, towards the end of the exposition. The exposition repeat was taken, the music heard for the second time fulfilling the twin functions of recollection and progression, the development section thus taking development further still. So did the recapitulation. My only real quibble was the (relative) withdrawal of vibrato for some of the fugal writing, which did not sound as though it were done entirely out of conviction. I loved, however, the (almost) throwaway ending.

 

The long lines and post-Mozartian luxuriance of the Adagio cantabile sections of the second movement were as striking as their decidedly ‘late’ or ‘late-ish’ Allegro counterparts: not so fragile or disjunct, perhaps, but played – and heard – in the knowledge that such would, in Beethoven’s œuvre, soon become a necessity, the generative quality of the composer’s rhythms notwithstanding. The return of the Adagio cantabile music sounded still more Elysian, yet there was sadness to the close too. Lilting joy and nagging insistence characterised the scherzo: here there were to be experienced both balance and dialectical interplay. The trio was finely poised, rightly, in similar yet contrasting fashion. Haydn’s spirit was present, indeed inescapable, in the opening statement of the finale – and why would anyone wish to escape it? Yet there was soon also a boisterousness to be heard that was not really his. Such were the terms of the human comedy that unfolded.

 

The first movement of Bartók’s final quartet opened with Ori Kam’s viola, not only mesto  as marked but splendidly misterioso, finding its way, asking (lamenting?): how did we (humanity?) come to this and yet, also, where must we go? I thought a little of the opening of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. There was barely suppressed fury in the ensuing Vivace material, like one of the insufficient instrumental answers prior to the entry of the word in the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Except, of course there would be no words: tragedy or another path? Uncertainty, here and elsewhere, seemed very much to be the game (which is not to say that these were ‘uncertain’ performances, quite the contrary.) The intensity of this first movement, and not only this movement, seemed to be part of a despairing attempt to turn inwards in the face of the horrors surrounding. In context, it seems anything but a cheap point to remind us that Bartók wrote the work in 1939, his last prior to leaving Europe.

 

The return to the mesto material at the beginning of the second movement was more clearly a cry, and yet the terms of that cry remained enigmatic. Cries became stronger still, more passionate, in the Marcia, without ever shaking off the shadow of sadness. Likewise in the third movement, although in both the mesto and the Burletta music, there was perhaps a greater note of bitterness, or was it resignation? The ambiguity was fruitful. What to make of the Stravinskian echoes? That question, not answering it, was surely the point. A Soldier seemed to wish to tell a new Tale; that did not mean that we could, or should, understand it. There was a sense of arrival, of inevitability, and yet also of uncertainty to the final Mesto movement: as finely balanced as the demands of Beethoven. In an atmosphere of serenity that disquieted, here was a destination that seemed at best to be a land of exile. And so it went on, until it did not. Almost the only thing not in doubt was the sincerity of work and performance alike. The rest would be silence.

 

Jerusalem Quartet - Mozart, Janáček, and Schubert, 24 April 2015

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Mozart – String Quartet no.14 in G major, KV 387

Janáček – String Quartet no.2, ‘Intimate Letters’

Schubert – String Quartet in D minor, D 810, ‘Death and the Maiden’

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello) 

 

I wish I were not having to write about this again, but not to mention what happened during the Jerusalem Quartet’s performance of Mozart’s G major String Quartet, KV 387, would be as bizarre as it would be dishonest. It inevitably coloured my response to both the performance of that quartet and the rest of the concert. Once again, protestors at a Jerusalem Quartet concert suddenly, shockingly disturbed performance and listening, by standing up, in this case during the second movement of the Mozart, to shout out their beliefs concerning the Quartet and its relationship to the Israeli state. The players continued to play throughout, which may or may not have been more shocking than if they had been compelled to down their instruments for a while. Eventually, the protestors, only two of them on this occasion, were led from the hall. Yet throughout the rest of the concert, I was on edge – and I cannot think that I was the only person to feel so – lest such an interruption occur again.

I am far from being someone who, whether genuinely or otherwise, believes that somehow music and politics do not mix. Indeed, I have spent a good part of my academic life arguing quite the contrary. Yet I simply cannot bring myself to agree with what happened. I should have nothing against protestors coming to the venue, handing out leaflets, as I have seen them do elsewhere, engaging members of the audience in discussion. However, violently to disrupt a concert in such fashion is, for one thing, extremely unlikely to achieve anything to further their cause; if anything, I should think it likely to turn some members of the audience against it. Moreover, it is, especially if one is listening with the intent that such a concert and such a programme demand, really quite disturbing, even frightening, to experience such a disruption. Of course, no one in his right mind would say that such an experience is in any sense comparable to what many Palestinians suffer on a daily basis. But the players of the Jerusalem Quartet, whatever use may be made of them by the Israeli state, are not simply to be equated with that state, whatever proponents of a cultural boycott might claim. Moreover, it is simply not the case that everyone in the audience is blithely sitting there, unaware of such issues, unreflective and uncaring; one does not have the right to force one’s own response to very difficult questions upon others. I can – and do – respect the arguments that lead some to stay away; there might, however, be more respect shown for those of us who have genuinely tried to grapple with the arguments and who have decided, sometimes with doubts, upon another course of action. It is certainly less than clear to me that, say, British recipients of public cultural funding under New Labour, when the state, much to the consternation of many of its citizens, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, should have been treated entirely differently.

Given that context, my remarks on the performances will be relatively brief; shaken as I was by what happened, I was not able to listen as I should have wished to. The players, insofar as I could tell, offered an admirable performance of the Mozart quartet. Tempi were apposite, permitting joy and melancholy to coexist, indeed to interact, as they should. The first movement seemed, as befits the first of Mozart’s ‘Haydn Quartets’, to take its lead from the elder composer, without overlooking, whether here or later, the almost operatic sensibility that infuses so much of Mozart’s œuvre. There may be Sturm und Drang in the conventional sense in the second movement, but that was quite overshadowed by external events; the beauty of the players’ performance nevertheless remained, rendering the contrast all the more disturbing – in all manner of ways. The slow movement was songful, almost painfully so, yet again it is difficult for me to say more. I was perhaps less convinced by the finale, in which I wondered whether some of the performance strained a little too much towards emphasis of the ‘learned’ counterpoint, rather than letting it speak for itself. But its general thrust was unarguable; and again, given the circumstances, it is difficult to say more.

Janáček’s Intimate Letters received a scorching performance; perhaps it scorched all the more in the light of what had happened. The extraordinary opening lacked nothing in either modernistic exploration or late Romantic passion. Some of the passages in harmonics, viola and cello in particular, sounded almost as if they had come from thirty years later, yet remained anchored in the composer’s own harmonic language. The ardent quality, seemingly believing in every note, of the players’ response to the entire performance had one listen as if it were given – and heard – in but a single, extended breath. Folk rhythms were never mere folk rhythms; ‘effects’ were never mere effects. And the third movement’s climactic confrontation, so clearly inspired by the composer’s love for Kamila Stösslová, yet equally clearly rising above such particularity, proved duly shattering.   

I am not sure I have heard a more furious account of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, though I am not at all sure how much of that was again a product of the circumstances, whether in performance or in listening. If the first movement seemed, to begin with, to look towards Bruckner – I thought in particular of the Ninth Symphony – then, as its workings became more complex, it was increasingly Mahler who came to mind. Great care was taken both to characterise each of the second movement’s individual variations, and yet to give shape to the movement as a whole. If there were hope offered during the turn to the major mode – and that is a big ‘if’ – then it was equivocal hope indeed. A defiant scherzo was founded securely upon harmonic rhythm, as such movements must be, to have their proper import. (Too often, one hears rhythm but little harmony.) The Totentanz of the final movement proved terrifying in any number of ways. I realise that such remarks are at best, excessively generalised, but hope that the reader will understand why, on this particular occasion, I am not able to say much more.

Jerusalem Quartet - Wolf, Mozart, and Smetana, 16 February 2013

Wigmore Hall

 

Wolf – Italian Serenade
Mozart – String Quartet no.22 in B-flat major, KV 589
Smetana – String Quartet no.1 in E minor, ‘From my life’        

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bressler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

 

 

The Jerusalem Quartet’s latest visit to the Wigmore Hall opened with a sunny performance of Wolf’s Italian Serenade. Full of life, there was, as ever with this quartet, never the slightest hint of routine. Mediterranean sun was to be felt – especially welcome in February – but quite rightly, this was sunlight as remembered from northern Europe. Solo playing, first from Kyril Zlotnikov’s cello, then picked up by his colleagues, was as fine as the ensemble work.

 

One of Mozart’s Prussian quartets, that in B-flat major, KV 589, followed. Cultivated yet vital, warm yet clear, this was an excellent account, both of the first movement and the quartet as a whole. Cello solos – the king of Prussia favoured in Mozart’s scoring – were beautifully despatched without standing out unduly: far more a foundation for contrapuntal exploration. An excellent Mozartian balance was struck between ‘late’ simplicity and ‘late’ (Bachian) complexity, both contrapuntal and harmonic. Lyrical elegance was the hallmark of the relatively relaxed slow movement, though how much art conceals art here, both in terms of work and performance. The cello was necessarily first amongst equals, but ensemble was the real thing. A gracious yet far from sedate tempo – just right for ‘Moderato’ – permitted the minuet’s detail to emerge meaningfully, and what detail there is here! With a proto-Beethovenian sense of purpose, this amounted to a well-nigh ideal performance. The finale has one of those very tricky Mozartian openings, in which the players must begin in medias res; almost needless to say, it was effortlessly navigated, drawing us into a wonderfully ‘late’ marriage of ebullience and vulnerability, contrapuntal severity and sinuous melody. Every note and every connection between notes was played with evident belief. Schoenberg would have understood – and approved.

 

Smetana’s first quartet offered quite a change of mood for the second half. Immediately one heard a more Romantic tone, Ori Kam’s opening viola solo richly expressive, likewise the other parts’ responses thereto. Performed on an almost symphonic scale, the development section in particular, the first movement exhibited a proper, indeed thrilling, sense of what was at stake. The ‘Allegro moderato alla polka’ captured perfectly the balance between rusticity and art. Depth of tone in the various solos sometimes had to be heard to be believed. Emotional intensity characterised the slow movement from the outset, that intensity crucially allied to an unerring instinct for harmonic rhythm. Together, those qualities meant that however high the temperature – and sometimes it was high indeed – the music never became over-heated. The finale opened with polished brilliance. If it lacked the weight of previous movements, that is a reflection upon the score rather than the performance: Smetana’s apparent attempt to adopt a Haydnesque strategy, whatever the autobiographical explanation, works less than perfectly, as is confirmed by the more overtly Romantic ending.

 

As an encore, we heard Shostakovich’s quartet transcription of the Polka from his ballet, The Age of Gold. Coming as it does from the composer’s more experimental youth, it proved far more interesting than most of his subsequent essays for these forces. Certainly the Jerusalem Quartet proved more than equal to its abrupt changes of mood, without imbuing them with inappropriate weight and ‘meaning’.

Jerusalem Quartet and friends - Schoenberg and Brahms, 7 May 2011

Wigmore Hall

Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht, op.4
Brahms – String Sextet in B-flat major, op.18

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)
Ori Kam, Yuri Zhislin (violas)
Kyril Zlotnikov, Adrian Brendel (violoncelli)


The Jerusalem Quartet has failed to disappoint me yet in a number of visits to the Wigmore Hall; this concert was to prove no exception. Here the players were joined by violist Yuri Zhislin (1993 BBC Young Musician of Year) and cellist Adrian Brendel. Since I last heard the quartet, Ori Kam has succeeded Amihai Grosz as violist. I noted a year ago the excellence of Kam’s performance in the well-nigh impossible viola part of Le marteau sans maître, conducted by Boulez himself. On the evidence of the present performance, Kam has achieved what one might have thought impossible, proving a more than worthy successor to Grosz, who is now principal viola of the Berlin Philharmonic (and who also shone in a recent London concert).

I could not help but wonder whether reversal of the two items in the programme, announced immediately before the concert, were an attempt to stem departures occasioned by the dread name of Arnold Schoenberg; there were certainly bewildering groans to be heard upon that announcement. Imagine, in 2011, or even in 1911, objecting to Verklärte Nacht! This performance ought at any rate to have converted any lingering dissenters. It did not always conform to my preconceived notions about the work, but why should it? Whenever I wondered whether the players were moving a little too close to Straussian tone poem, ironically away from Brahms, the excellence of their performance disquieted any fears – and made me wonder anew at quite how closely Schoenberg’s essay in so ‘absolute’ a form as the string sextet follows Richard Dehmel’s verse. One does not need to know the latter to listen to the former. An odd thing is that, even when one knows the poetry well, one can forget it in the midst of performance; not here though, for I was constantly put in mind not only of Dehmel’s words but of their musical sublimation. More than once Tristan came to mind; this was a struggle to be understood dramatically as well as tonally – just like that world-historical transition in the second string quartet. Occasional – and I do mean occasional – fraying mattered not at all; if anything, it reminded one of the players’ and, more to the point, Schoenberg’s humanity.

An unusually slow opening, or so it seemed, contrasted strongly with ensuing passion. This, it seemed, was to be a Mahlerian performance, a sextet that encompassed the world. Sweetness of tone did not preclude properly febrile tension in passages that undoubtedly look forward to Schoenberg’s subsequent quartets. (We really need to hear the Jerusalem Quartet in those!) Kam’s beautiful rich arco tone contrasted with Zhislin’s searing pizzicato. Generous cello vibrato from Kyrill Zlotnikov was perfectly gauged to provide warmth at the turning point of sextet and verse. Leader Alexander Pavlovsky’s sweet violin tone emerged as transfiguration (Verklärung) itself. What emerged triumphantly, perhaps surprisingly so in so ‘pictorial’ a performance, was the true sense of quartet music writ large for six, sextet form proving as much a forum for interaction and reaction as the quartet. Individual personality was enhanced, not precluded: let no one say chamber music is apolitical. Climaxes sent shivers down the spine. This was not merely an excellent performance; it was a special performance.

Brahms’s glorious sextet, which I have always founded far easier to warm to than his quartets, received an equally fine reading. The players managed well throughout that tricky yet necessary balancing act between Classical (the first movement’s opening bars) and Romantic (the response). Brahms without rich mahogany sound is not Brahms at all, whatever rebarbative ‘authenticists’ might claim; ‘rightness’ of tonal quality here permitted one, Janus-like or rather Brahms-like, both to look backward and forward through musical history. There was, moreover, an equal ‘rightness’ to be heard when it came to phrasing; one almost did not notice it, so natural did it sound, art concealing art. An impeccable sense of structure was married to Romantic passion, enhancing both, so that one might marvel anew at Brahms’s astonishing craftsmanship and feeling. There were especially heart-rending solos to be heard from Zlotnikov and Kam: melancholy perhaps, but never, in Nietzsche’s malicious barb, the ‘melancholy of impotence’.

I was a little taken aback yet utterly convinced by the depth of Schubertian pathos to the slow movement, which proved ardent, impassioned, and based upon true, harmonically-grounded strength of purpose, defiance even. The sheer strangeness of the major-mode drone variation, whatever precedent it might have in Haydn, shone through. It was Beethoven, though, who immediately came to the fore in the scherzo, though the humour, perhaps belying Brahms’s reputation, was rather less gruff in nature. Metrical dislocation both looked back to Beethoven and indeed to the minuet of Don Giovanni, an opera beloved of Brahms, but also forward to the Second Viennese School, Brahms’s closest successors. (Someone who claims to ‘understand’ Brahms but not Schoenberg is listening to neither.) The opening opposing trios of the finale evinced Mozartian charm, yet in a nostalgic, arguably tragic, vein: Mozart’s reconciliations can be no more – just as in Schubert. This movement balanced, as did the performance as whole, battle hard won and vital affirmation.

Performances of the Year, 2010

2010 has been a depressing year politically (can anyone remember one that was not?), but there has been much to celebrate in the arts. I am probably tempting fate by naming performances of the year now, but should any more come along in the next week-and-a-half, all the better. I have limited myself, as last year, to twelve, so averaging once a month. A good few performances have found themselves almost arbitrarily rejected, sometimes on the grounds of offering a broader selection, but all the reviews remain of course. Enough of the caveats; here they are, the order solely chronological, with links to the full reviews:

Staatskapelle Berlin/Daniel Barenboim: Beethoven and Schoenberg, Royal Festival Hall

Daniel Barenboim's survey of the Beethoven piano concertos proved a little more hit and miss than his sonata cycle. However, when the performances came off, they really came off, as in this account of the Third. Nevertheless, it was for Schoenberg, an enduring passion, that Barenboim truly pulled out all the stops. Not only did he and the Staatskapelle Berlin - may they never be forgotten! - provide a superlative performance of the Variations for Orchestra, op.31, something of a Barenboim speciality; Barenboim prefaced it with a straightforwardly brilliant spoken introduction to the work. Did he not already have a multiplicity of careers, I should recommend him as a university lecturer, though the rest of us might soon be out of our jobs...

The Gambler: Royal Opera House

Prokofiev's first opera, bar juvenilia, finally arrived on stage at Covent Garden, and in style! Richard Jones's production looked good, indeed very good, and managed more or less to make sense of the drama's hectic comings and goings. A fine cast had no weak links, but Susan Bickley's Babulenka truly stole the show. As ever with opera, there are simply too many variables to have no cavils at all (why did it have to be sung in English?) but this was a wonderful evening, a true credit to a company which, when it puts its mind to it, can equal any in the world.

Matthias Goerne/Helmut Deutsch: Schubert Lieder, Wigmore Hall

These musicians seem so unerringly excellent that they could readily be taken for granted - that is until one hears a recital such as this, haunted by death yet also ravishingly beautiful. Dramatic power and subtlety were employed in equal measure.

Maurizio Pollini: Chopin, Debussy, and Boulez, Berlin Philharmonie

Pollini had impressed mightly in one of the Royal Festival Hall's two 'birthday' recitals for Chopin. (So had Krystian Zimerman in the other.) This Berlin recital was, if anything, still finer. The complete Chopin Preludes emerged in perfect balance both as a tonal cycle and as a sequence of characteristic pieces. A selection from Debussy's first book proved a sonorous and musical delight; would that Pollini's detractors could have heard such warmth. Finally, Boulez's Second Sonata, as part of the Berlin Staatsoper's celebrations for the composer's eighty-fifth birthday. The work can surely never have been better performed, even by Pollini.

Hommage à Pierre Boulez: Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin

Members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra performed under Barenboim and Boulez for this birthday tribute. Messagesquisse and Anthèmes 2 received excellent performances, Hassan Moatez El Molla an exceptionally fine cellist in the former, with Michael Barenboim bravely and convincingly essaying the violin part of the latter. Le Marteau sans maître from the hands of Boulez himself sounded more beautifully, almost Mozartian, than ever: quite mesmerising.

Jerusalem Quartet: Mozart and Janáček, Wigmore Hall

Mozart requires but one thing: perfection. This is what he received here, in as winning a performance of any of his quartets (this time the D minor, KV 521) as I can recall. Janáček's Intimate Letters quartet was equally fortunate, in a performance as intensely dramatic as any of the composer's operas. What an age this is for young (and other!) quartets...

Quatuor Ebène: Mozart and Bartók, Wigmore Hall

The Quatuor Ebène, in another of the Wigmore Hall's delightful Sunday morning coffee concerts, proved every inch the equal of the Jerusalem Quartet. More Mozart: this time the early Divertimento, KV 136/125a, by turns richly expansive and light as quicksilver, was followed by another intense performance of a twentieth-century masterpiece, Bartók’s Second Quartet. The frozen viol-like opening of the final Lento was but one highlight of many.

Trpčeski/RLPO/Petrenko: Schumann, Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky, BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall

Two young musicians proved that they are worth all the fuss - and more. Simon Trpčeski single-handedly - well, double handedly, with the orchestra and conductor - reignited my enthusiasm for a work I fancied I had heard too many times: Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. In an outstanding performance of Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko proved themselves at least a match for any metropolitan orchestra-and-conductor pairing.

Lewis/CBSO/Nelsons: Wagner, Beethoven, and Dvořák, BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall

My other Prom selection is strikingly similar in a number of respects: another outstanding combination of young pianist, young principal conductor, and rejuvenated 'regional' orchestra: Paul Lewis, Andris Nelsons, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Moreover, this was another far-from-outmoded overture-concerto-symphony programme. Lewis and Nelsons provided a wonderful, musicianly account of Beethoven's second concerto, far superior to Lewis's recording in which he is unfortunately lumbered with a dull conductor. The New World Symphony received a performance both thoughtful and exciting, another 'warhorse' fashioned anew.

Elektra: Salzburg Festival, Grosses Festspielhaus

Opera, as I remarked above, is well-nigh impossible to get right in every respect. This performance of Elektra came very close indeed. No star shone more brightly than that of the world's greatest orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic; truly it had to be heard to be believed. Daniele Gatti revelled in the orchestral sound and Strauss's, holding in as fine a balance as I have heard the demands of modernity and sweetness, and never for one moment losing the long musico-dramatic line. Nikolaus Lehnhoff's production proved just as single-minded, devoid of gimmicks, strong on truth. And with a cast including Waltraud Meier, Janice Baird (excellent last-minute replacement for an ailing Iréne Theorin), Eva-Maria Westbroek, Robert Gambill, René Pape, the deal was sealed.

Dame Mitsuko Uchida: Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin, Royal Festival Hall

Utterly different from Pollini's Chopin, Uchida's proved equally distinguished. The late-ish Beethoven E minor sonata received a vigorous and dramatic as well as typically thoughtful account, whilst Uchida captured ths shifting moods of Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze to perfection. Her recent recording clearly needs to be sought out.

Piotr Anderszewski: Bach and Schumann, Barbican Hall

Despite my earlier protestations of balance, here was another piano recital I simply could not omit. More Schumann in a fortunate anniversary year: Anderszewski's own arrangement of the Canonic Etudes for pedal piano and the late, disturbing Gesänge der Frühe. (We are, I hear, now blessed by a recording too.) Anderszewski's Bach - here the Fifth and Sixth English Suites - is truly second to none: fiercely Romantic and musically profound. Bach, as ever, emerged as the greatest Romantic and the greatest composer for piano of them all.

Jerusalem Quartet - Mozart and Janáček, 23 May 2010

Wigmore Hall

Mozart – String Quartet no.15 in D minor, KV 421
Janáček – String Quartet no.2, ‘Intimate Letters’

Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler (violins)
Amihai Grosz (viola)
Kyril Zlotnikov (violoncello)

Following the previous night’s Mozart and Janáček from the Jerusalem Quartet, there came a Sunday morning bonus, performed at just as distinguished a level. The second of Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets, that in D minor, opened in achingly beautiful fashion, relishing the composer’s chromaticism, whilst imparting lilting grace to the first movement’s second subject. Mozart’s reminiscences of Gluckian noble simplicity – for instance the Don Juan ballet music, also in D minor – were married to a veiled menace entirely the younger composer’s own. The development section was properly intense, thematically oriented, whilst the recapitulation bore its tragic burden stoically. Quiet intensity characterised the slow movement, which once again succeeded in conveying an underlying, if illusory, sense of simplicity; art concealed art. A passionate cello-led episode led one to wonder at the richness of Kyril Zlotnikov’s tone: fine playing indeed. The vehemence – Mozart’s D minor daemon again – of the minuet was never astringent; quality of tone must never be sacrificed here. But that would have been as naught, had it not been for the players’ strong underlying rhythmic pulse. The trio caught perfectly the ambience of a Mozartian outdoor serenade – and serenaded to we were too, by Alexander Pavlovsky’s sweet-toned first violin. Backed by his pizzicato band, he would then be joined in an unerringly well-judged duet by Amihai Grosz’s rich-toned viola. (No wonder that the players would encore this trio at the end of the concert.) The minuet’s reprise would sound still more heartfelt. Pathos of tonality and siciliano rhythm marked the opening statement of the finale’s theme. Intensity of feeling if anything increased during the variations, tragedy heightened by voiced delight in Mozart’s developmental ingenuity and an unfailing appreciation of its dramatic implications. Grosz’s viola solo truly provided something to savour in the third variation, whilst the grace of the turn to the major mode in its successor proved both balm and illusion enough, rendering the return to D minor all the more poignant.

As with the previous night’s performance, the opening bars of the Janáček quartet, in this case his second, Intimate Letters, brought an instantly convincing identification with the composer’s sound world – and his harmonic and rhythmic twists and turns. The very difficult trick to bring off is to convey an overriding formal continuity to this music, without underselling the dramatic thrust of its discontinuities. Add to resounding success in that respect an extraordinarily wide expressive range, from red-blooded passion to harrowing bleakness, quiet stillness to jealous anger, and you might approach as fine a performance as this. The Adagio brought moments of transfiguration – Katya Kabanova sprang to mind – but anger and sadness remained. In keeping with the highly dramatic framework, I could imagine the third movement as if it were the opening of a new act in a Janáček opera: the forlorn heroine glimpsed at home, reflecting upon her predicament, trying to reach some form of resolution, its implications becoming clear, likewise the urgency to act. Fanciful? Doubtless, but indicative of the dramatic commitment at work here. Final resolution did not prove easy in the final movement, nor should it have done. It looked back but equally provided something new, crucial to dramatic conclusion. Interruption was as much the thing as the interrupted dance. Somehow, almost miraculously, but in fact testament to the Jerusalem players’ understanding, movement and work proved utterly coherent.

Music and Politics in the Real World? Jerusalem Quartet - Mozart and Ravel, 29 March 2010

Wigmore Hall

Mozart – String Quartet no.21 in D major, KV 575
Ravel – String Quartet in F major

Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler (violins)
Amihai Grosz (viola)
Kyril Zlotnikov (violoncello)

I have never been to a musical performance like this, and hope that I shall never do so again. That could be the prelude to a savage attack; rest assured that it is not. It could be the prelude to a performance so unbearable in its intensity that, like Wagner’s fears for a great performance of Tristan, it would be injurious to one’s sanity. This, however, has nothing directly to do with the performance, excellent and – in the circumstances – almost incredible, but rather with events that unfolded in the concert hall. I do not wish to sensationalise; at the same time, I think it would be disingenuous not to deal with some at least of the issues that arose, not least since it would be a wholly inaccurate account of my experience, were I to put them to one side.

Arriving in the nick of time for the concert, I registered a couple of policeman outside the Wigmore Hall, along with someone who seemed to be handing out leaflets. Insofar as I gave the matter thought at all, I vaguely wondered whether this might be a Palestinian issue, but was in too much of a rush to consider matters further. The hall was packed: not always typical of a BBC lunchtime recital but, by the same token, not necessarily atypical either. Having greatly enjoyed the evening recital from these players (plus Lawrence Power) of Mozart and Debussy a couple of night before, I was very keen to hear the present programme. The Mozart D major quartet, KV 575, opened with many of the virtues heard in the previous programme’s Mozart works, albeit with a recognition of the greater profundity of the present work vis-à-vis the early quartet on Saturday. (Then we had also heard the G minor quintet, quite a different matter.) This was a fully mature conversation, all the more so given the imperative handed to the composer to write a prominent cello part. The commissioner, the King in Prussia – not of Prussia, as is often mistakenly claimed – was himself a cellist and had also engaged the services of the celebrated Jean-Pierre Duport as director of chamber music (hence Mozart’s Duport Variations). The consequence is, as Anthony Burton pointed out in his programme notes, that Mozart made ‘everybody in turn a soloist,’ heightening the contrapuntal interplay that was in any case characteristic of his late style. That was something clearly relished by all of the Jerusalem Quartet’s players; it would be invidious to single out any of them, though I cannot resist putting a special mention the way of violist, Amihai Grosz. (Not for nothing was this Mozart’s favoured instrument as a quartet player himself.) The tempo seemed just right, likewise phrasing and the timing and weighting of climaxes.

On to the Andante. The sweetness of first violinist Alexander Pavlovsky’s tone struck me immediately, but almost as quickly did the players’ perfect counterpoise between harmony and counterpoint: absolutely fundamental to Mozart, yet so abominably difficult to achieve. (And the pay off is that it sounds ‘right’, rather than impressive in the virtuoso sense.) This is not a movement I should expect to terrify, but then it did – or rather something quite horrifying occurred during the performance. A woman rose to her feet and made a noise. For a split second, I was unsure what it was; then I realised that she was singing – in a reasonably imitation of a trained voice. ‘Jerusalem’ was the first word, followed by ‘is occupied’. She proceeded to shout out denunciations of Israel, ‘an apartheid state’, the attack on Gaza, the use of phosphorous, and so forth, seeming to implicate the quartet, though it was not clear how. I did not note down everything word for word, so should prefer not to guess or to misrepresent. Bewilderment turned into commotion and the players had to stop. Members of the Wigmore staff came to her row in the stalls and led her out of the hall. After a certain hiatus, the performance resumed where it had left off. Some bars later, a further interruption occurred from elsewhere in the hall: a man, I think, this time, though I am not entirely sure of my recollection. To say that it was unnerving was an understatement; I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for the players. And what else might be in store? Might there be something more than heckling? The players, this time having left the stage, eventually returned and resumed the movement, making their way to the end. By this time, of course, many in the audience, myself included, must have necessarily had other thoughts in their minds. What issues did this raise, especially in the allegedly most ‘pure’ of Classical forms, the string quartet? Although I shall talk a little about this later, I thought it better at least to mention it here, since this was perforce very much part of my experience as a member of the audience. By this stage, however, the disruption of the work’s aura was complete; fear and anger were increasingly palpable.

The minuet was taken at a fastish tempo but without sounding hard-driven: again, a necessary but devilishly difficult task for Mozart performers. It was perhaps a little faster than I might have expected, given the general nature of the performance and my experience of the quartet’s general approach; I wondered whether this might be an attempt to make up time, given what had happened in the previous movement. In the circumstances, the players’ attentiveness to each other and general stylishness seemed little short of miraculous. The audience, one could sense, remained on edge; I certainly was. It was likewise remarkable how full of grace and genuine give-and-take the trio proved. But we made it to the finale, though no one knew whether the interruptions – I am trying to employ ‘neutral’ language, whatever the nature of my own feelings – had ceased. I should have noticed the fullness of sound in any case, I think, but given the circumstances, it resounded all the more, perfect to support that precarious balance or dialectic between harmony and counterpoint. The movement perhaps sounded a bit precipitate, but one could well understand why. I myself was willing the players to make it to the end before another intervention. It was not to be…

… This time proved, if anything, nastier. The music having stopped again, some members of the audience began to shout at the protestor: hardly unreasonable, though one man in particular seemed a little too eager for a fight, calling out personal abuse. One frustrated audience member, seated in front of the present protestor, turned and initiated some sort of physical contact, which was broken up when the protestor was led out. A man from a few rows behind shouted out, condemning the responding audience member’s behaviour. It was unclear whether the man now calling out were another member of the organised – I realise I am making an assumption here, but it can hardly have been spontaneous – group, or whether he were sympathetic and simply venting his opposition to such behaviour. My suspicion, and it is only that, is that the latter was the case. Eventually, Amihai Grosz spoke, attempting to address accusations – apparently levelled in the leaflets being dispersed outside – that the quartet was somehow supported by the Israeli government. He said that it was not, which was good enough for me, and referred to the fact that every Israeli citizen must perform military service. (There are conscientious objectors, of course, but let us leave that on one side.) At any rate, they were only musicians. (I shall come back to that.) The players were clearly uncertain as to whether to carry on, or as to whether they would be permitted to do so. It was a relief to have the hall's front of house manager now walk to the front and ask whether we wished the quartet to resume. There was no equivocation in the response, so the players did as they were asked. I do not know whether the broadcast, which had presumably made this an attractive, high-profile proposition for protestors, had ceased by then. An announcement that the only remaining audience was in the hall might have helped. Music won through, though, as the performance proceeded to its end. Applause was warm, to put it mildly. Some, myself included, stood.

Then Ravel. The cool, calm, collected nature of the opening seemed all the more remarkable on this occasion. Beautifully stylish, the performance pulsated with life, especially in the inner parts. This, someone such as Daniel Barenboim would doubtless argue, is what music can do. I differ from Barenboim concerning his understandable divorce of music from politics, but enough of that for now. Those, though, were thoughts that I could not banish from my mind, however much I wished to concentrate on ‘the music’. Something that sounded like anger – the relationship between music and the emotions, let alone their personification, is complex – understandably made itself sound, or at least I heard it, followed by a relative calm that could not quite be placid.

Interruption again… When the music resumed, Ravel’s apparent serenity was anything but. On this occasion, the unanimity of pizzicato in the second movement’s opening bars was all the more thrilling. Was that anger again one heard soon after? The Lent section was full of tension not necessarily in the music – or, again, this was how I heard it. Relief on completing the movement without extra-musical incident compensated somewhat. Shimmering background was the setting for a profound melancholy to the lyricism of the slow movement’s opening. Climaxes were rapt: surprisingly Romantic, but not inappropriately. I admit, though, that I found it impossible properly to concentrate. Perhaps one had to have to, as the players did. Again, this movement proved free of disruption, but I cannot have been the only one to fear that something was being kept in reserve for the finale. The disciplined violence of its opening bars would have told anyway, but certainly did now, likewise its searing lyricism. The courageous – in my view – players of the Jerusalem Quartet made it to the end. Once again many of us stood to applaud them.

I do not believe in art for art’s sake, in principle or phenomenologically. To attempt to remove art from the political sphere, or politics from art, goes against everything I hold dear. What, then, should one think about what happened? There is probably no one thing one should think – which may be the most important thing to remember. The protestors would doubtless claim that the disruption caused was as nothing compared to the events in Gaza. It is difficult to disagree. But is that the point? And were they on sure ground with respect to these musicians? So far as I could discern afterwards, the protestors’ grievance seemed initially to have been derived from a dubious website. Barenboim’s personal heroism is of course quite something, but should one expect such heroism from everyone, especially, dare I suggest, from musicians who do not have the luxury of being Daniel Barenboim? And what should one think if, for instance, one knew that performers supported something one found abhorrent? Is it not a good idea to rejoice in music’s capacity to heal? Or is that an illusory æstheticism? Again, there are probably no singular answers – and a lack of plurality is again a major part of the problem. My thoughts led me to that enigmatic shout of ‘Deutschland über alles, Herr Schuricht!’ at the 1939 performance of Das Lied von der Erde in Amsterdam under Carl Schuricht. Was that woman protesting? Was she a supporter or was she voicing sarcasm? How can one fail to feel horrified, whatever the response? The reader may discover for himself; the performance was recorded. These are all difficult questions, which is not to say that one should not attempt to answer them. However, one should guard against definitive answers, not out of some misguided desire for ‘moderation’, but because there is nothing more totalitarian than a simplistic response. The Jerusalem Quartet players acquitted themselves magnificently. I admired them before as musicians; I admire them now as men.