Right on the heels of reviewing last Thursday and Friday's concerts, I went back to Menlo to review Sunday's. I liked the performances, but I spent some time in the review disputing the premise. This was the 20th-century entry in the historical survey, and they called it "The Turbulent Century," but the choice of music was hardly that. Half the pieces were ingratiating, and the others were too captivating to deserve the term "turbulent," which to me has something of a negative connotation, and deserves to be attached to more aggravating music. At any rate the principle by which music must be advanced to the point of obnoxiousness, so much promulgated in the last century, was entirely absent from this concert. Good riddance as far as I care, but not very accurate to the historical portrait.
I went to the Prelude concert beforehand, intending to include it, but I decided I'd said enough already. Besides, it included a repeat performance of the Beach Quintet, which I'd already mentioned (against my initial intent) in Thursday's review, and in any case I thought Thursday's was a better performance.
I'm glad I let the festival's communications person talk me into getting the recorded livestream of the Calidore's concert of Beethoven's Opp. 130/133 and 132 quartets. Someone I talked with later didn't like the performances, but I thought they were quite adequate. The tenderness and beauty all came out where it should; the Heiliger Dankgesang's Molto Adagio was about as slow as it could get without losing motion, and it melted nicely in to the Andante; and that was about as light and cheerful a Grosse Fuge as I've heard, as it bounced its way along.
Despite a general rule that works should be played in the last version the composer left us, it's now pretty much obligatory to play Op. 130 in the initial version with the Grosse Fuge finale. Beethoven let his publisher convince him to detach this and publish it separately - thus Op. 133 - and provide a replacement finale, but not only was that replacement not played in this supposed complete cycle of Beethoven's quartets, the program notes are written as if they're expelling it from the canon. It was the last composition Beethoven ever wrote, so surely it's worth something.
But why did Beethoven, normally so uncompromising with his work, let his publisher convince him to change his mind? David Ludwig (no relation to Beethoven: he actually brought this up), the next Wednesday's lecturer, said Beethoven published it separately to give people more of a chance to get to know this difficult work, and indeed he also published an arrangement for piano four-hands, a common way then of bringing orchestral music into the home but rare for chamber music: that's Op. 134. That would explain it; I'm satisfied with that reasoning.
Ludwig's talk was on Beethoven's influence on later composers. He said that Beethoven's developments in scale, range, complexity, and musical syntax make him not just the most influential composer, but the most influential artist ever in any medium on that medium. He gave an example of Beethoven's technical innovations in how Beethoven builds the entirety of his Fifth Symphony out of that four-note motive at the beginning. A remarkable example, because that's exactly the work that initiated my own devotion to the heavy classics, and that's exactly the aspect of it that did so.
After noting Schubert and Brahms and their response to the heavy tread of Beethoven behind them, Ludwig focused on three subsequent composers: Schoenberg, who faithfully applied Beethoven's principles to his own more harrowing music (including that all-encompassing motivic development, except that Schoenberg forgot to provide a good motive); Debussy, who set himself up as the anti-Beethoven: no clarity of form, no narrative focus, no clear contrasts; and the contemporary Joan Tower, an admirer of Beethoven's principles who also incorporates the influence of Debussy.
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