Since this past Saturday, Herbst Theatre has hosted three chamber music recitals, all of which presented programs organized around the pairing of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. In covering the performances on Saturday and Sunday, I referred to these composers as the “later” First Viennese School, as compared with the two “earlier” composers, Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Both Beethoven and Schubert departed from the more “traditional” (but still highly inventive) practices of Haydn and Mozart; and one could appreciate those departures in the programs that the visiting ensembles prepared.
On Saturday Beethoven was represented by his “middle period” Opus 95 “Serioso” quartet in F minor, while Sunday’s trio recital took the repertoire all the way back to the third of his Opus 1 piano trios. The Schubert offerings were both written later in the composer’s relatively short life, the brief D. 703 “Quartettsatz” on Saturday and the seriously large-scale D. 898 (first) piano trio in B-flat major on Sunday. Last night saw another coupling of early Beethoven with late Schubert.
Modigliani Quartet members Amaury Coeytaux, Loïc Rio, Laurent Marfaing, and François Kieffer (photograph by Luc Braquet, courtesy of San Francisco Performances.
This time the performance, presented by San Francisco Performances, was by the Paris-based Modigliani Quartet led by first violinist Amaury Coeytaux. The other members of the group are violinist Loïc Rio, violist Laurent Marfaing, and cellist François Kieffer. They began their program with Giacomo Puccini’s “I Cristantemi” (chrysanthemums), a far cry from the third composer on the two preceding programs, an early quartet by Felix Mendelssohn on Saturday and Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 26 (second) piano trio in G minor, composed in 1876, on Sunday. While the Puccini selection was significantly shorter in duration than the Mendelssohn and Dvořák offerings, it definitely served as a calm before a storm.
In the performances of both Beethoven and Schubert, intensity was the order of the day. The Beethoven selection was the third (in the key of D major) of his six Opus 18 quartets. The intermission was followed by Schubert’s D. 810 quartet in D minor, whose Andante con moto (second) movement is a set of variations on the theme from his D. 531 “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (Death and the maiden) song.
The rhetorical approach to both of these quartets was particularly underscored with abrupt shifts in expressiveness, often in a transition from one phrase to its successor. The capacity of the ensemble to turn on a dime made for riveting accounts of both of the selections. Even for those familiar with both of the offerings, there were no end of suspenseful moments when one wondered what would come next and how it would arrive. One might almost say that the performance took these artifacts from the early nineteenth century and injected them vigorously into the immediate present.
Last night’s audience clearly appreciated that vigor and its consequences. This resulted in an encore, which reflected the opinion that one good Schubert performance deserves another. Nevertheless, the selection was an impressively remarkable one.
Deciding that a late achievement should be complemented by an early one, the ensemble performed the Andante con moto movement from the D. 46 quartet in C major. While I have a “complete quartets” album in my collection, I must confess that this was the first time I was consciously aware of a double-digit Deutsch number! Nevertheless, the Modigliani players presented it as a vivid omen of things to come.
Taken as a whole, this was an exciting and stimulating evening; and I hope it will not be long before this ensemble makes another visit to San Francisco.
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