loud shirts, great music

Yesterday (Wednesday) I and three of my OSO colleagues gave a free lunchtime brownbag concert at the Old Church in downtown Portland.  As we were rehearsing on Tuesday, the conversation drifted around to the subject of dress – what would we wear for this concert?

The concert came at the instigation of the violinist and raconteur Greg Ewer, who wanted an opportunity to play some favorite quartets with people that he didn’t normally get a chance to perform.  His ethos behind the concert was to have fun – no pressure, just making music with friends and in front of a friendly audience.  So, jokingly, he suggested we wear Hawai’ian shirts.

We were in luck, because our other violinist, Inés Voglar, is married to OSO principal violist Joël Belgique, who has a world-class collection of the loudest shirts that are legal to wear in public!  She found four prize specimins (which all happened to basically fit us) and off we went!

Clothing aside, the program consisted of two quartets: Haydn’s op. 76 no. 5 and Beethoven’s op. 18 no. 6.  Each is from an opus of six quartets, the Haydn from the end of his compositional life (he only wrote one more group of quartets, the op. 77), the Beethoven from the beginning of his compositional life.  Beethoven was very much indebted to “Papa” Haydn for his group of op 18 quartets – for Haydn had inspired Mozart to write his set of six quartets dedicated to the older master, and it was Mozart’s set of “Haydn” quartets (K. 385, 421, 428, 458, 464 and 465) that in turn inspired Beethoven to write his initial set of six.  In fact, Beethoven wrote a virtual bar-by-bar remake of Mozart’s A major K. 464 as an homage to the elder composer when he wrote his A major quartet, op. 18 no. 5.

Another thing that occurs to me is that this brings me closer to my goal of completing my “life list” of playing all of the Beethoven quartets at least once.  Thus far I’ve performed the following opuses: 18/2, 18/6, 59/2, 59/3, 74, 95, 130, 131, 132, and 135.  That means I only have 18/3 thru 5, 59/1, 128 and 133 to go!