O1C: Two Centuries; Two Women Composers

Last night cellist Stephen Harrison returned to Old First Church to present the Ives Collective in the final Old First Concerts (O1C) program of the month of January. His co-manager, violinist Susan Freier, was unable to attend due to injury. She was replaced by Robin Sharp, performing with violinist Kay Stern, violist Clio Tilton, and, during the second half of the program, pianist Elizabeth Schumann.

1842 portrait of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The program was structured around women composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first half was dedicated to Fanny Mendelssohn with a performance of her only string quartet, written in the key of E-flat major and composed a few years after her marriage to Wilhelm Hensel in 1829. As I recently observed, I have been aware of that quartet since January of 2013, which is when Quatuor ébène released their Felix and Fanny CD; and I rather regret that I have not had more opportunities to listen to the piece. When I first wrote about it for Examiner.com, I tried to make the case that Fanny was more imaginative than her brother Felix in both melodic structure and harmonic progressions; and the freshness of my listening experience in 2013 quickly came back to me last night. Nevertheless, Felix was given the “last word” on the first half of the program with one of his last works, the Adagio (third) movement from his Opus 80 quartet in F minor, which seems to have reflected his awareness that he would not live much longer.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Florence Price’s A minor piano quintet. This may have been more familiar listeners, particularly those following the Catalyst Quartet of violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette, violist Paul Laraia, and cellist Karlos Rodriguez. They performed this quintet with pianist Michelle Cann last April during their final Uncovered series recital for San Francisco Performances, named after the series of albums they have been producing for Azica Records.

Listening to the music again I was once again reminded that Price was probably influenced by her encounters with the music of Antonín Dvořák. However, she very much had her own way in dealing with four-movement structures. Many of her compositions substitute a Juba for the Scherzo movement, and this quintet is one of them. However, she seems to have then felt that the Scherzo was getting neglected; so her final movement was a Scherzo, rather than a more “classical” form.

Truth be told (as they say), I was more interested in refreshing my knowledge of Price’s quintet than in the opening selections. The quintet was one of those pieces that was only discovered in 2009, one of a chestful of manuscripts. This was a major find in mapping out Price’s repertoire as a composer, and I expect that the map is still being drawn. However, while the music historians are hard at work, we can still enjoy the efforts of those trying to bring all that previously-unknown music into performance venues. The Ives Collective definitely deserves credit for contributing to those efforts.