Mendelssohn Quartet's farewell concert

The Mendelssohn String Quartet, a staple of Chamber Music Society programs for more than 20 years, is going the way of all flesh, although its members— violinists Miriam Fried and Nicholas Mann, violist Daniel Panner and cellist Marcy Rosen— are still hale and hearty, and playing quite well together.

Chamber music fans hate to see string quartets break up; it feels like losing a whole branch of the family. Life on the road gets wearying, though, and as Michael Hollinger's play Opus reminded us a few seasons back, the enforced intimacy of traveling musicians can have its personal drawbacks.

I know nothing of why the Mendelssohn Quartet is separating, and I can only wish its individual members well. I can report that they are quitting while still ahead, which is not the worst time to go.

As is fitting for a retrospective, their final program touched on the various ages of man: a very young Felix Mendelssohn, a maturing Bela Bartok, and an elder (though hardly elderly) Ludwig van Beethoven.

An astonishing work

Mendelssohn was 18 (but already a veteran composer) when he wrote the second of his six quartets. It's quite an astonishing work, as the Romantic era bursts out suddenly in full voice. Schubert was still around and about, of course, and his Quartettsatz of 1822, with the three quartets that followed it, might justly lay claim as the first "Romantic" quartets. They still wear a certain Beethovenian classicism, though, while the Mendelssohn A minor is song from first bar to last, its own considerable technical skills notwithstanding.

This is music that lies well within the Quartet's range, and which they play, as one might imagine, with special authority. The hush that followed the end of the Adagio second movement was breathtaking, the product of a totally committed music making.

What the Mendelssohn Quartet doesn't especially feature is big, solid tone and scale. The musicians sit uncommonly close together, and their sound, intimate and vibrant at its best, can seem a little cramped when challenged by more muscular music. Bartok's Second Quartet could have used a bit more breathing room, and the Beethoven A minor, which concluded the very generous program, needed even more.

Bartok in the spotlight

Bartok's Second, according to the program notes, has been the most frequently performed of his six quartets. It certainly will be this year, with three separate performances on the Chamber Music Society calendar. My own impression, though, is that the last four quartets get more attention in general.

The Second, completed in 1917, is a work that wavers among styles: It contains elements of the early musical Impressionism that characterizes the First Quartet; of the Expressionism that came to the fore with Bluebeard's Castle, Bartok's only venture into opera; and hints of the taut, aggressive Modernism that would become his signature style in the 1920s.

It's an emotionally unsettled work as well, with a stabbing, scherzo-like middle movement and a long, brooding lento, which concludes the work with an abrupt punctuation that seems rather to say, "That's enough," rather than "The end." The performance had many fine moments, but, as I say, a little too much enclosure.

Curiously archaic Beethoven

Beethoven's Fifteenth Quartet is at the summit of the literature. Completed in 1825 following a long illness and only two years before his death, it draws upon modal as well as tonal resources, which give it a curiously archaic, not to say otherworldly air. Nonetheless it was, with most other late Beethoven, far too daring for its time, and the ecstatic, pages-long description of it given a century later in Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint (1926) shows that it was even then still in the process of assimilation.

That is not to say that one is ever on familiar terms with Beethoven's late idiom, which continues to challenge even today, and I daresay will for many a tomorrow. The long A major scherzo, for example, is built almost entirely on a five-note figure that is repeated as obsessively as any minimalist motif in Terry Riley or Philip Glass, yet never fatigues. The secret lies in the harmonization, which is endlessly rich and varied. Analyze away at late Beethoven all you wish, though, and you are still left to wonder, "How does he do it?"

A glimpse of heaven

The core of the work is the great, 15-minute adagio that Beethoven labeled a song of thanksgiving. It is we who give thanks, of course, for as clear a glimpse of heaven as this earthly vale affords: pained, to be sure, but unutterably beautiful. How does one descend after such an experience?

Unlike the adagio finales of Mahler, or of the Bruckner Ninth, the A minor's adagio doesn't leave nothing more to be said; rather, it's the central span in a five-movement architectural bridge. Beethoven plunges right in with a vigorous Alla Marcia that breaks off suddenly in an impassioned recitative that leads directly into an extended sonata-rondo finale— happily extended, for Beethoven twice prolongs music one is loath to see stop by diverting an apparent ending.

Once again, one could have called for more size and heft in the reading, but there was vigor enough, and special sensitivity in Miriam Fried's violin. The capacity Perelman audience slowly rose to see the Mendelssohn players off with an ovation.

The A minor Quartet: That's what I call really going out on top.