TeleLab Examines Korngold’s Third Quartet

After four very busy weeks of “physical” performances, things appear to be quieting down for much of the current month. As a result, I have an opportunity to catch up on videos I have been meaning to view for some time. Of particular interest was my discovery of the TeleLab project being presented as Facebook videos by the Telegraph Quartet of Eric Chin and Joseph Maile sharing the first violin chair and joined by violist Pei-Ling Lin and cellist Jeremiah Shaw.

The “mission” of TeleLab appears to be one of enabling “lay persons” to acquire some understanding of “what makes the music tick” without drowning in a flood of technical jargon. (As Anna Russell put it so well, this is not the work of some “great expert delivered for the edification of other great experts!”) Description becomes a matter of finding the right words to capture the nature of the listening experience and then reinforcing those words with a video clip of the excerpt from the performance that those words were trying to capture. The second installment in this series was uploaded to Facebook this past July 17, and the music being presented was the first movement of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 34 (third) quartet.

Korngold himself was introduced to the viewer as the leading figure in composing scores for Hollywood films. His success in that endeavor allowed him some personal flexibility with time to create more “serious” works, some of which would draw upon thematic material from his film scores. One of the best examples is the Opus 35 violin concerto, which seems to have been composed in 1945 (roughly the same time as Opus 34) in reaction to the end of World War II. This concerto was premiered and championed by Jascha Heifetz, and its Wikipedia page provides a blow-by-blow account of the films with themes that Korngold repurposed.

The Opus 34 quartet, on the other hand, is not quite as “programmatic” in its thematic material. Nevertheless, the Telegraph players, all of whom provide verbal commentary about the quartet, make it clear that the music itself is highly subjective. Thus, the discussion begins with a “Road Map” which outlines the structure of the quartet’s first movement as a series of episodes that unfold a narrative framework as follows:

• Angstful First Theme
• Relief from the Angstful Theme
• Attempt to Break Free!
• Aftermath
• Coping with Angstful Theme
• Begrudging Acceptance

Each of these episodes is introduced verbally by one of the performers, followed by a video clip demonstrating what had just been discussed. That video summarizes the episode titles, highlighting each as it occurs to orient the listener:

Telegraph Quartet members Joseph Maile, Pei-Ling Lin, Jeremiah Shaw, and Eric Chin (screen shot from the Facebook video of the performance)

All this amounts to a well-conceived strategy to guide anyone through the listening experience, novices as well as more “experienced” concert-goers. There was also a clear sense that none of the introductions sounded as if they were being read from a prepared script, but each of those introductions could not have been better focused on the points it was intended to make. It is clear that as much effort went into preparing the introductions as went into preparing the performance itself, setting a standard that will hopefully continue in subsequent TeleLab videos.