by Daniel Hathaway
On Tuesday, December 5, the Emerson String Quartet will return to the Cleveland Chamber Music Society Series for the first time since 2011. Violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton, and cellist Paul Watkins will play Joseph Haydn’s Quartet Op. 20, No. 2, Benjamin Britten’s Quartet No. 2, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 15 in a 7:30 pm concert at Plymouth Church presented in cooperation with the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Winter Chamber Music Festival.
The Emerson need no introduction to fans of chamber music. Now one of the most venerable quartets on the international circuit, the group has been active for over four decades since its founding in 1976, with only one change in personnel — cellist Paul Watkins joined the Emerson in 2013, replacing David Finckel. On a personal note, I vividly remember hosting them on the Gund Concert Series at Groton School in Massachusetts very soon after they first got together, and when their practice of alternating first and second violins was still an innovation.
The repertory for the Emersons’ December 5 performance may also need no introduction for diehard chamber music aficionados, but other listeners might appreciate knowing a bit about the music and getting some of it in their ears before Tuesday evening. Happily, there are some unusually informative resources on YouTube that may be of interest to both parties. We’ll go in reverse program order, beginning with a performance by the Emerson Quartet itself.
Shostakovich: Quartet No. 15
The Emerson Quartet will conclude their concert on December 5 with Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 15, the Russian composer’s last essay in the form. It’s a sobering work, much involved with the idea of death, and like Haydn’s Seven Last Words, is written as a series of Adagios, six of them in Shostakovich’s case.
There is no better Internet resource for studying Shostakovich’s string quartets than the exhaustive treatment they receive from Stephen Harris (click here for his discussion of No. 15). And happily, we have access to a performance of No. 15 by the Emerson Quartet themselves, recorded during a live performance in Aspen in 1994, twenty years after Shostakovich wrote the piece. This video lets you follow along with the score, and if you watch it on the YouTube site, includes helpful hotlinks to each of the movements for easy navigation.
Britten: Quartet No. 2.
Benjamin Britten’s close association with Henry Purcell is underscored by his birthdate on St. Cecelia’s Day, November 22, the calendar day after Purcell died. Those events were years apart, of course, but the transfer of musical spirit from one composer to the other seems more than merely accidental.
Britten wrote his second string quartet to be premiered on the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death, paying tribute to the 17th-century composer in its third movement Chacony — the term Purcell used for a chaconne or passacaglia. Purcell’s involves 21 variations on a 9-measure theme, separated into four sections by cello, viola, and first violin cadenzas.
The second quartet was first performed by the Zorian Quartet at the Wigmore Hall in London on November 21, 1945, and recorded by them a year later. Those of us who are used to the large capacity of compact discs or cloud-stored music will be amused to know that the piece took up seven sides of a 78 rpm four-disc album, and that the eighth side featured Britten himself playing the viola in Purcell’s Fantasia upon one note.
When Roger Parker was professor of music at London’s Greshman College — he now serves as Thurston Dart Professor of Music at King’s College, London — he gave a series of lectures accompanied by live performances. Here is a video of his introduction to Britten’s Second String Quartet, followed by the entire quartet, played by the Badke Quartet in June, 2013.
Haydn: Quartet in C, Op. 20, No. 2.
Haydn had already composed two set of quartets before the six works of his Op. 20, written in 1772 when he was 40 and serving as Kapellmeister to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. Op. 20 marks an important compositional development for Haydn, who turned away from the simple-textured galante style that had replaced Baroque polyphony in the mid-18th century. Three of the Op. 20 works end with fugues, including No. 2, which even at one point treats its subject a revescio, or in contrary motion. Other Haydn innovations include treating all four instruments equally — No. 2 is striking for beginning with a cello solo — and expanding the content of the standard third-movement menuet well beyond that of a court dance — lines tied across the barline in No. 2 de-emphasize beats.
Here’s a video of a performance of Op. 20, No. 2 by the Quatuor Ebéne recorded at Festival Wissembourg in August, 2016.
For another take on the Emerson’s December 5 program, come early and hear a pre-concert lecture by Rabbi Roger Klein at 6:30 pm in Herr Chapel.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com November 30, 2017.
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