I hate going to concerts. I love going to concerts. Perhaps I was required to read too much Kant and Hegel in my undergraduate senior thesis class. I’ve got a nice, ripe dualism in my psyche. It’s a common dilemma to most performing musicians. We have a night off, and the last thing we want to do is go to see a concert, a play, or a movie. But going to see something satisfying and good is, well, satisfying and good. And that is entirely worthwhile. Just as Sunday night’s debut concert by the string quartet Mousai Remix proved to be.
I know all four players very well – especially violinist Shin-young Kwon, as she’s a member of the Arnica String Quartet as well – and they are all fabulous. They’re not only great orchestral players, but great chamber musicians as well. One might think that these qualities are mutually exclusive, but in fact, they’re highly dependent upon one another. A truly great orchestral player must first be a great chamber musician. I don’t know of any circumstance where this is not the case. So it was a joy to hear these four first-rate chamber musicians strut their stuff last Sunday night at Ivories Jazz Lounge in the Pearl District. It was a big concert, featuring two sprawling string quartets by two of the giants of Western music – Beethoven and Brahms. Such was the quality of the concert that I was just able to listen to the music and not worry about what my friends were doing (i.e., ‘this is a difficult bit coming up, hope it goes ok’), and think about these two huge string quartets as they played out before me and the assembled capacity crowd.
Beethoven’s Op. 59/1 ‘Rasumovsky’ is the first quartet of his so-called ‘middle period’. It comes right on the heels of his massive Eroica symphony, and even has a similar orchestration to the symphony at its onset (minus the two sharp chords that open the Eroica), with the upper strings repeating an accompanying figure while the cello plays the opening theme. I was struck, hearing this piece again, by the two competing forces at work in this quartet.
The first is breadth. Beethoven allows his themes to unfold as they require. There is no sense of things being forced to either extremity. There are big changes in dynamics, to be sure, but they don’t come close on each other’s heels. Everything in good time, Beethoven seems to say. It’s like watching a confident driver take out a luxury touring car for a long drive, and taking the roads as they come to her.
The other force is a concise logic. Everything happens in its time, and that timeframe is expanded, but the themes and their transformations are so precise and logical – it’s like watching continental drift in time-lapse. It’s taking its time, but it is inevitable and unstoppable in its progress.
The genius is what Beethoven lays over these two dualistic factors: emotion. Especially in the slow third movement. There are such moments of singing joy, melancholy, and anguish in this movement that you forget the clockwork, the mechanism, that ticks away steadily underneath. I know people that just don’t ‘get’ Beethoven, and I feel sorry for them, because this emotional heart is always at the forefront of everything that he writes, even in the midst of incredible compositional virtuosity.
The Brahms quartet that followed, his first of three quartets that he allowed to survive past infancy, shares a lot with the Beethoven. You get a sense that Brahms is frustrated by the limited resources allowed by just four instruments. He makes it hard for the performers, because he keeps demanding more, and trying to make the quartet more than what it is. But success with his quartets demands less. Paring down the textures, allowing organic growth, never letting the music shriek at the loudest moments. If an ensemble can do this, the quartet breathes and flexes. It’s interesting, because Brahms is so masterful with his orchestrations in his orchestral works, whereas Schumann is often criticized as being a clumsy orchestrator, but his chamber works seem outwardly to be more successful than Brahms’. This is due to the density of the thematic development that Brahms strives for, rather than being a bad chamber music orchestrator. Schumann goes more for a classical clash between contrasting thematic elements, whereas Brahms is going for continuous thematic evolution, which makes for a more dense and chaotic seeming compositional environment.
Those are my musings on what the four muses of the Mousai Remix brought forth last Sunday night, and I hope to pick up the theme again after their next concert, featuring the second quartets of Beethoven’s Rasumovsky and Brahms’ Op. 51 sets.