Above: the Danish String Quartet, photo by Caroline Bitten
Sunday February 21st, 2016 - Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's festival performances of the Beethoven string quartets drew to its close today with the Danish String Quartet playing the last music Beethoven ever wrote.
This was my first encounter with The Danish. Their story is probably unique among music-making ensembles, for three of them met as kids and fellow foot-ballers: so they literally grew up together. This may account for their wonderfully integrated sound. Along the way, a Norwegian cellist joined the family, fitting in perfectly.
This evening, as each voice was introduced to us at the start of the C-sharp minor quartet, I felt transfixed. I suddenly didn't want to take notes, but rather to immerse myself in the music that was casting a spell over the wonderfully hushed, packed-to-the rafters Tully Hall.
The C-sharp minor quartet evidently seemed incomprehensible when it was first heard publicly in 1835, after the composer had already passed away. Certainly a first glance at the Playbill listing strikes one as very odd: seven movements? But Beethoven had been experimenting with structure over the years, and so she set this Opus 131 in seven sections, to be played without pause.
Richard Wagner, reflecting on the first of these seven movements, said that it "reveals the most melancholy sentiment expressed in music". Today it perhaps seems more pensive than sorrowful. The second movement, marked Allegro molto vivace, is lively and extroverted. Following a brief ensemble recitative, we come to the slow movement, so expressive of yearning and tenderness.
In the Presto that follows - a whirlwind scherzo really - wit prevails in a lively, scurrying mode: here the Danes were at their most charming, and as this merry movement raced to its conclusion, the audience, thinking an end had been reached, were on the verge of unleashing a gust of applause. Then, with tongue-in-cheek irony, the players go on to a brooding Adagio and then a brilliant finale.
Upon finishing, the members of the Danish String Quartet were engulfed in a flood of applause and cheers. They were called out three times, a rather unprecedented happening.
During the intermission, I sat thinking about how - from my eleventh year until rather recently - so much of my musical focus has been on opera. Beethoven's FIDELIO has never really attracted me - aside from Leonore's glorious "Abscheulicher!" - and so the composer's other works, iconic as they might be, have never really lured me. In fact, it's only in the past three or four years - since I started attending Chamber Music Society and The New York Philharmonic regularly - that Beethoven's music has begun to attract me. Better late than never!
Earlier in this CMS Beethoven cycle, the Miró Quartet's playing of the "Razumovsky" quartets was a revelation. Of the symphonies, I'm most enamored of the 4th at present...something other music-lovers will find odd, I'm sure. But: enough rambling. Back to the matter at hand!
Of his final completed full work - the F-major quartet, Opus 135 - Beethoven reportedly stated that it was short because the commissioning fee was 'short'; the sponsor would get what he paid for. And it was here, in the third movement marked Lento assai, cantante and tranquillo, that I found the Beethoven I've been searching for all these years - without knowing it. This music, which The Danish played so lovingly, really spoke to me. The entire piece, more traditional in both its structure and style than Opus 131, held the Tully audience in a state of rapt attentiveness: and the playing was marvelous throughout.
The concert concluded with the last music Beethoven ever completed: a 'Finale: Allegro' which would serve as an alternate ending for the B-flat major quartet Opus 130. Here the players of The Danish were at full sail, clearly savouring both the music and the audience's delight in listening to them.
The triple curtain call after Opus 131 was not a fluke, for the four blonde members of the Danish String Quartet reaped a full-house standing ovation at the close of this grand evening.
As so often happens nowadays, this great music - and the Quartet's playing of it - turned gloomy thoughts of a world full of strife and woe into an optimistic notion that there's still hope for humanity.
Meet The Danish String Quartet here.
The Artists:
Violin: Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen
Viola: Asbjørn Nørgaard
Cello: Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin
The Repertory:
- Beethoven Quartet in C-sharp minor for Strings, Op. 131 (1825-26)
- Beethoven Quartet in F major for Strings, Op. 135 (1826)
- Beethoven “Finale: Allegro” from Quartet in B-flat major for Strings, Op. 130 (1826)