ASQ Previews Beethoven Marathon Videos

Readers may recall that, a little over a week ago, the San Francisco Performances (SFP) all-day Beethoven Marathon took place in Herbst Theatre. Unfortunately, no audience was admitted; but video recordings were made of all three events, the introductory lecture about Beethoven delivered by SFP Historian-in-Residence Robert Greenberg and two performances by members the SFP Ensemble-in-Residence Alexander String Quartet, whose members are violinists Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violist David Samuels, and cellist Sandy Wilson. Greenberg’s lecture is now available for viewing at the Front Row: 2020 Online Concert Series video archive on the SFP Web site; and the concerts will be uploaded on the next two Thursdays, December 24 and December 31, respectively.

For now, however, the Front Row site has two videos of selected movements from Beethoven’s string quartets. The first video begins at the beginning, with the first two movements of the first of the Opus 18 quartets in the key of F major. The second video then covers the “middle” and “late” period quartets, each with a single movement. The “middle” selection is the opening movement of the second of the Opus 59 (“Razumovsky”) quartets in the key of E minor; and the “late” offering is the final movement of the final quartet, Opus 135 in F major. All three of these excerpts are prefaced with remarks by violist Paul Yarbrough, who was the ASQ violist when the videos were made.

Zakarias Grafilo, Frederick Lifsitz, Paul Yarbrough, and Sandy Wilson playing Beethoven at St Stephen’s Church (from the Front Row “middle period” video)

The Opus 18 video was recorded during a performance this past summer at Baruch College in New York City. The two performances for the second video were recorded at St Stephen’s Church in Belvedere, the same space that ASQ used to make video recordings of their performances of the three string quartets by Johannes Brahms. St Stephen’s has much livelier acoustics than the Baruch auditorium. One could therefore appreciate the wider range of dynamics that Beethoven deployed as he became more and more experienced. On the other hand the Baruch space was suitable for the intimacy of chamber music composed before the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Given how much can be said about any single string quartet that Beethoven composed, Yarbrough definitely knew how to keep to the basics and resist the many temptations to digress. My only serious criticism came with his evoking a well-known quotation about Beethoven:

He was a Titan wrestling with the Gods.

Yarbrough claims this was expressed during Beethoven’s lifetime, but it was actually written by Richard Wagner! More important is that Yarbrough identified a few of the salient points that divide the early, middle, and late periods stylistically, which is all any eager music-lover needs to know before listening to (and viewing) these performances.