The Blair String Quartet plays Beethoven and Mendelssohn

The Blair String Quartet's Friday night concert at Ingram Hall highlights the richness that can arise when a great composer enters consciously into dialogue with a predecessor. The program features Mendelssohn's Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13, alongside the work that most directly inspired it, Beethoven's Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132.

The Blair Quartet is one of the best-established chamber groups in town. Their wonderful mix of personalities and the long-term stability of the group's roster always create a warm rapport, and their interpretations are thoughtful and convincing across the range of quartet literature.

Beethoven's late works, particularly the quartets, have accrued weighty associations over the years, a kind of metaphysical aura that has compelled many writers as well as musicians from Schubert to Stravinsky. The A-minor quartet inspired T.S. Eliot's contemplative Four Quartets, Milan Kundera associates Beethoven's last quartet with the gravity of Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence, and Aldous Huxley, I regret to report, has a character commit suicide while listening to the slow movement of the A-minor.

That movement's historical origin does suggest a kind of transcendence. Beethoven wrote it in 1825 after recovering, albeit briefly, from a grave illness, and he dubbed it a "Holy Song of Thanksgiving."

The music conjures holiness partly by evoking the more ancient styles of Bach and Palestrina. Its meditative stillness, though, flows mainly from a harmonic stasis unthinkable in Beethoven's earlier style, and its contrasts arise from direct juxtaposition of more lively sections rather than from smooth transitions.

Such abruptness helped make Beethoven's late style unpalatable for many contemporary listeners, including Mendelssohn's father. After Beethoven's death in 1827, however, Mendelssohn himself—having at age 18 already composed substantial works—encountered the late Beethoven quartets and took them as a model for his own A-minor quartet.

The first movements of the two works on Blair's program have clearly similar main themes, and other specific references to Beethoven abound in Mendelssohn's piece. A slow chromatic fugue subject suggests the older composer's Op. 95; a motif alluding to Mendelssohn's song "Is it true?" echoes the "Must it be?" motif of Beethoven's Op. 135; and the incorporation of earlier movements into Mendelssohn's finale recalls the Ninth Symphony.

Most intriguing, though, is the music's broad-ranging and experimental character. It's sometimes hard for me to hear late Beethoven clearly through the patina it's acquired, so hearing Mendelssohn's reaction freshens my own. The younger composer finds more expressive breadth than metaphysical weight in his model, and he seems to hear a lyricism that his contemporaries mostly missed.

Email music@nashvillescene.com.