beethoven love

Here’s a brief post (unfinished) about Beethoven’s Op. 127 string quartet, which I performed last night in the debut performance of the Bainbridge Quartet.

It’s really always an adventure to play any Beethoven quartet. It doesn’t matter if it’s an early, middle, or late period quartet. Beethoven demands the ultimate attention to his musical intentions. If one tries just to play Beethoven, rather than digging into what he’s after, the performance will be a failure at most, and stultifying at best. The rewards for this required attention are great, however. There are unlimited reservoirs of logic and expression that reward such close examination of the quartets of Beethoven.

For me, the highlight of last night’s performance was the grand Adagio second movement – one of Beethoven’s great variation movements (second, perhaps, only in scope to the variation movement of the Op. 131 C-sharp minor quartet). The great thing about a movement such as this one is that even with concentrated amounts of rehearsal time, there are always discoveries to be made in the heat of a performance, and in every additional performance that follows. I remember talking with Earl Carlyss at Peabody (who was a member of the Juilliard Quartet for 20 years), who said that he’d performed the complete cycle of Beethoven quartets several hundred times, and that he’d never felt like there was an end to the discoveries to be made in sight. There aren’t many other bodies of work by one composer about which one could say the same.