Beethoven Sonata Series, Part
8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 14 in Turner Recital Hall, Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University
Miró String Quartet
8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 15 in Langford Auditorium, Vanderbilt University
For string-music lovers, this weekend offers a bonanza: On successive evenings, in two venues, two Vanderbilt organizations present a pairing of concerts very likely unique anywhere. The programming reaches from the classical period’s sophisticated lucidity to the late 20th century’s foreboding tragic power. It begins with Beethoven sonatas for piano and strings (solo violin or cello) played by faculty from the Blair School of Music in Blair’s Turner Recital Hall. It concludes with string quartets by Beethoven, Grieg, and Shostakovich, played by a brilliant young foursome calling themselves the Miró String Quartet—musicians as audacious as the Spanish surrealist painter they took their name from—in Vanderbilt’s Langford Auditorium.
The Blair concert on Friday is the first in a series of five to be offered over the next two years. During these concerts, all 10 of Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and violin, and all five of his sonatas for piano and cello, will be performed. Craig Nies is the pianist. Felix Wang is the cellist. Christian Teal, Cornelia Heard, and Carolyn Hueble are the violinists; Teal, first violin with the Blair String Quartet, plays this week’s opening concert. He and Nies will perform the Sonata in A major, Op. 12, No. 2, and the Sonata in C minor, Op. 30, No. 2. Between these, Wang and Nies will perform the Sonata in F major, Op. 5, No. 1.
Friday’s program is noteworthy in a number of ways. Though all these sonatas may be counted as “early” (and not “middle” or “late”), this music shows not only Beethoven’s connections with the classicism of Haydn and Mozart but also his unfailing urge to innovate. So while the Op. 12 and the Op. 5 exhibit the confident sanity of the Age of Reason, Beethoven is already pushing the envelope: Instead of showcasing the piano with accompanying strings, Beethoven treats the instruments as equals whose responsibilities are mutually interdependent. Moreover, from the very beginning Beethoven poured into his music what critic Tully Potter called “an added ingredient of energy which seemed to be straining against the limitations” he had inherited. This is especially evident in the Op. 30, which falls on the cusp between “early” and “middle” Beethoven.
The cello sonatas have an added claim to distinction: One critic has written that apart from Bach’s baroque sonatas for solo cello, “Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano were the first significant contributions to the cello literature.” And though the Op. 5 dates from 1796, Beethoven’s individualistic energy is evident already.
Thus, in this program one will hear the classical matrix Beethoven was formed in, and within that matrix the robust daring of the man who has been the poster artistic genius since the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. The musical realizations should be very fine indeed.
That program is to be followed on Saturday by another that opens with an “early” Beethoven string quartet and includes quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich and Edvard Grieg. Evidently these two programs come back-to-back by sheer coincidence. But the Beethoven link is a perfect one, and the segue from sonatas featuring soloists to quartets in which single filaments of sound intertwine to make one expressive four-fold voice could not have been better designed on purpose. And this latter program has as its axis what is arguably the 20th century’s greatest composition for string quartet.
The performers are equally impressive. The four youngsters who comprise the Miró String Quartet joined forces in 1995 when they met at the Oberlin Conservatory. They began winning prizes right out of the chute, debuted at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, and have ever since been busily performing all over the world, from Alice Tully Hall in New York to the Jerusalem Music Center in Israel. They are dedicated to teaching younger artists and amateur musicians; they are committed to contemporary music—and to making classical music a joyful experience and not a dreary duty. For them, the Langford Auditorium program is pretty conservative. But it looks to be powerful nevertheless. They open with Beethoven that sounds more like Haydn and Mozart—the first of the six Op. 18 quartets. While like the Op. 12 violin sonatas that sound more drawing room than storm-wrung forest, these quartets also exhibit some rumbles of thunder and flickers of lightning.
But the radioactive core of this program is the Quartet No. 8 in C minor by Dmitri Shostakovich. This composer is one of the great enigmas of the 20th century—an artist who lived his life in the Soviet Union, was harassed greatly by Stalin’s minions, and yet emerged as perhaps the greatest symphonist since Beethoven and as a composer of string quartets rivaled only by Béla Bartók. Shostakovich wrote 15 of each, and as critic John Warrack writes, “Taken together they give a remarkably complete picture of this enigmatic, tragic musical personality.” The Eighth Quartet is perhaps the darkest he ever wrote.
It was inspired partly by the composer’s visit to Dresden, Germany, where he saw the devastation wrought there by fire-bombings during World War II. But Shostakovich himself called it an autobiographical quartet. It quotes a song, he said, “known to all Russians: ‘Exhausted by the hardships of prison.’ ” Built on a musical theme (D, E-flat, C, B) that in German terminology would spell DSCH—i.e., D. Shostakovich—the music is as fiercely purgative as his opera Lady Macbeth, based on Shakespeare’s dark drama.
The Miró close with the only completed string quartet by the Norwegian Edvard Grieg. Grieg accused himself of “catering too much to popular tastes,” and Claude Debussy famously remarked that Grieg’s music resembled “sweetmeats filled with snow.” Even so, Debussy took Grieg’s Quartet in G minor as the model for his own quartet with the same name, and so identified Grieg as the bridge between the genre as Beethoven left it and the Impressionism Debussy used to lighten Ludwig’s lager.
Such an aleatory concatenation of great music is unique in my experience. I refer not only to the two evenings back to back, but also to the dramatic figure inscribed by the two together—an irregular pyramid beginning with a stretch of Beethoven, reaching an apex with Shostakovich, followed by what professor Erik Tawaststjerna has called Grieg’s “fragile Nordic melancholy” as a kind of consolation. Either of the programs alone should nourish the soul. But to experience both, one after the other—that should anoint the head with oil and make the cup run over.
