The Daedalus Quartet and Ricardo Morales at the Perelman Theater

The recital opened with Paul Hindemith’s too-seldom performed Clarinet Quintet, Op. 30, a work of virtuoso invention, with Hindemith’s characteristic energy in its first, third, and fifth movements, and a rarer delicacy and lyricism in its second and fourth. The joke in the piece is that the finale is the opening movement played backwards, at exactly the same tempo. As Eric Bromberger notes, this is “music beholding itself in a mirror.” It’s no mere trick; the music sounds equally convincing played from either end and makes for a remarkable symmetry in a composer justly renowned for his sense of musical architecture.

Ricardo Morales sat in as the clarinetist, making light of the score’s formidable demands and projecting the suavity of tone that has made him the defining artist of his generation at his instrument. The musicians clapped and patted each other as they exited the stage, having obviously enjoyed themselves as thoroughly as the audience did.

As for Hindemith, he was rather lucklessly born under the still-gigantic shadow of Richard Strauss, and, latterly, that of the Second Viennese School. The Nazis drove him from Europe, as they did Arnold Schoenberg, and he had to reinvent himself in America, which he did with great success. A musical polymath, he could play most instruments of the orchestra serviceably and the viola superbly well. He was equally talented as a conductor, theorist, and pedagogue, and he is the last German composer whose works, both chamber and orchestral, still regularly hold the international stage.

Robert Capanna’s String Trio is also a five-movement work, which plays on short, emphatic motifs. Mr. Capanna has attempted to do the critic’s work for him by characterizing its various sections, e.g., “Light, whimsical, but mysterious” and “Thoughtful, with growing conviction: Whimsical, surreal.” At 25 minutes, the piece seemed a bit long for its material, but it exhibited a sure compositional hand and would be well worth rehearing.

Beethoven lost and found

The program concluded with Beethoven’s Quartet No. 13 in B-flat, Op. 130, in its original version. That version ends with the Grosse Fuge, a work published separately and now known under its ultimate opus number, 133, as well as in a piano reduction, Op. 134, whose autograph version was found in Wynnewood a decade ago. Beethoven’s publisher, Mathias Artaria, complaining of the Fugue’s daunting length and complexity, persuaded him to end the quartet with a more conventional rondo scaled to its preceding five movements. Artaria had a point: The Grosse Fuge (actually a free-form work with fugal episodes and a cantus firmus) was far beyond the capacity of most professional musicians of the day, not to mention amateur groups that made up the bulk of the market. It is still a challenge to any group.

So, which version to perform nowadays? Beethoven’s late quartets, for all their formal innovation, are remarkably well-proportioned, and with the alternate rondo Beethoven provided Op. 130 is as well. Nor is the rondo a negligible piece of music; it makes an entirely appropriate conclusion to the heartfelt Cavatina that precedes it and to the quartet as a whole. The Grosse Fuge seems to come out of an entirely different world, questioning rather than complementing the music that has come before it.

To modern taste, this is not a bad idea, and, as Bernard Jacobson notes, the Fuge subtly reflects elements in particular of the first two movements of the score, thus suggesting an overall unity. But it is still true as well that, at more than half the length of the previous five movements combined and at an altogether different level of severity, tension, and intellectual stretch, an audience may well experience the original work as a forcible conjunction of two disparate visions.

Greater familiarity with the original version may lessen this impact to a degree, but it can never entirely dissipate it — nor should it, for one of the things we prize in late Beethoven is his ability to overturn all previous conceptions of how music should be. The Fourteenth Quartet, Op. 131, would solve a similar formal problem with a finale of great tautness and seriousness, but one more contained within the context of the whole. But let’s say the B-flat Quartet is a debate both sides can win because, in either of its versions, it is great music.

The Daedalus Quartet has a fleet and limpid tone, and I wondered a bit how well it would scale the heights of the Grosse Fuge. But it acquitted itself well and brought a fine afternoon to a satisfying close.