Only two CDs remain in this site’s traversal of the Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56; and only one of them consists entirely of Juilliard performances. That is an album of two string quartets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, K. 499 (“Hoffmeister”) in D major and K. 575 (the first of the three “Prussian” quartets) in the key of D major. The other is an album of the music by Darius Milhaud, which includes his Opus 185 Cantate de l’enfant et de la mère (cantata of the child and the mother). This is a setting of poems by Maurice Carême scored for string quartet, piano (Leonid Hambro) and narrator (Madeleine Milhaud, the composer’s wife). This is coupled with the original piano version of the suite La muse ménagère (the household muse), played by Milhaud himself.
The Mozart performances were recorded in the spring of 1953. The release of the album postdated the releases of all the albums of music by the Second Viennese School composers. It also postdated the release of a recording of Maurice Ravel’s only string quartet, which, in the Sony Classical anthology, is coupled with Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. (Personally, I think that Ravel’s spirit would have found Milhaud to be better company; but that would have deprived us of the opportunity to listen to Milhaud playing his own music!)
This modest representation has led me to wonder whether this was a time when interest in Mozart was limited to his operas with libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte and his late symphonies. At the very least, this may have been a bias in New York, if not the East Coast. When I consulted my copy of Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971, I discovered that that the 1950–1951 season of the Evenings on the Roof chamber music series included six concerts in which the Mozart string quartets and quintets were juxtaposed with contemporary quartets composed in both Europe and the United States.
Three string quartets contributed to the performances: The Compinsky Quartet, the Coriolan Quartet, and the American Art Quartet. That last ensemble can be found on several of the CDs in the Sony Classical collection that were part of the Modern American Music Series. Of particular interest is that the American Art Quartet’s performance of Leon Kirchner’s first string quartet is coupled with the Juilliard playing Irving Fine’s string quartet. In fact their recording of the Kirchner quartet took place after they had given the first Los Angeles performance of that quartet as part of the Roof series.
All this seems to suggest that interest in Mozart’s chamber music was far stronger in Los Angeles than it was in New York! The fact is that the recordings made by the Juilliard tend to reinforce that conjecture. The intense attention that is given to Béla Bartók and Arnold Schoenberg never really surfaces on the Mozart CD. It almost feels as if the ensemble is giving “readings” of that quartet out of some sense of duty that Mozart quartets are good for you, somewhat in the spirit of what they would say about canned spinach in the early Fifties. My guess is that, if the recordings are available, an anthology of the Roof performances of Mozart would be a more stimulating listening experience.
The Milhaud cantata is a much lighter offering. Both texts and music are miniatures in scale, meaning that the composition is over before you know it. The same can be said of Milhaud playing his own piano suite. Both of the compositions are appealing; but, having just written about this year’s Darius Milhaud Concert on the campus of Mills College, it is hard for me to avoid feeling that these pieces are better appreciated in performance than on recordings.
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