Tokyo String Quartet at Convention Center

The Frog, the Harp and the Stalin Prize

ROBERT ZALLER

The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society won’t perform next season at the Convention Center, which is undergoing the renovation that has left a gaping hole on Broad Street where the historic facades of two important buildings used to be. To emphasize the point, the lights were abruptly turned out on the audience filing out of Tuesday night’s performance by the Tokyo Quartet and guest pianist Lydia Artymiw, leaving it to find its way to the Arch Street exit in the dark. Given the lack of decent space for chamber music performance in Philadelphia, it was an ominous commentary.

As for the Convention Center itself, it ought to be leveled rather than expanded, not only for its own sterility and ugliness but also for its arrogant and vindictive assault on Philadelphia’s architectural heritage. Lights out on you, baby.

That said, a fine concert was offered by an excellent group. The Tokyo Quartet, like most brand-name chamber groups, has retooled itself over the years and now includes two gaijin, first violinist Martin Beaver and cellist Clive Greensmith, along with the veteran second fiddler Kikuei Ikeda and violist Kazuhide Isomura. The newcomers are actually the best musicians in the group, particularly Beaver. In string quartets, the musicianship and tone of the first violinist makes or breaks the ensemble, and Martin Beaver is first-rate. He is clear and eloquent, and projects both sensitively and assertively. Greensmith’s cello is more subdued but sings well with Mr. Beaver’s rich, round sound.

Someone heard a croak

Haydn’s so-called “Frog” Quartet, the Opus 50, No. 6, is the last and best known of a mid-career group dedicated to Frederick the Great of Prussia, a man sensitive and assertive in his own way, since he was both the best musician ever to wear a crown and the most unprincipled aggressor of the 18th Century. The Quartet derives its name from Haydn’s use of bariolage, the technique of playing the same pitch alternately on two adjacent strings. Apparently someone heard a croak in that; hence the frog.

I don’t find a bear in Haydn’s Symphony No. 82 either, but then not all 18th-century wit is subtle. Haydn himself, on the other hand, is all genuine wit and esprit, and he will probably remain the favorite recital-opener as long as the string quartet is performed, especially when played with the art and refinement of the Tokyo Quartet.

There are the usual adventures: the pause in the adagio where Haydn lays four simple notes into the silence, and the quiet ending of the finale, which curls up in a sly little smile. The menuetto offers a touch of Sturm und Drang melancholy, but only like the breeze that clears a summer day: nothing to worry about, just a cloud on its way.

About those opus numbers…

Beethoven’s Harp Quartet, Opus 74, was the first of his quartets to be published with an independent opus number after the six of Opus 18 and the three Rasoumovsky quartets of Op. 59. If Beethoven had lived no longer than Mozart, the Rasoumovskys would have been his final statements in the form, and they are works so revolutionary in scope and expression that, like the Eroica Symphony, they transformed the classical style. One might say that, thereafter, works other than solo miniatures had to have their own opus numbers, although the quartets of Schumann’s Opus 41, Mendelssohn’s Opus 44, and Brahms’s Opus 51 would remain the exceptions to the rule. Beethoven himself assigned each of his final seven quartets its own opus number, and each is so distinctive that one cannot imagine it jostled by a neighbor.

The Harp Quartet— so called for the arpeggio and pizzicato effects in its first movement— has always been a bit of a loner. After the high drama of the Rasoumovskys, it might seem to signal a retreat into more traditional forms, except that it is constantly innovative and surprising, from the slow introduction to the opening allegro with its starkly distended chords and suspended tonality (“an unnecessary jumble of harsh dissonances,” according to a contemporary review) to the deep-drawn lines of the adagio’s cantabile theme, with its foretaste of the static, almost timeless atmosphere of the late quartets, to the syncopations of the finale. Here, too, the Tokyo drew a rich sound while clarifying contrapuntal textures.

Romantic vs. Classical

One may say of Romanticism that it’s essentially narrative in form, while the Classical style is conversational. That is, Romantic music tells a story, however convoluted it may become, while Classical composition is discursive, with none of its voices having a final say. Beethoven is the clear dividing line here, forging the 19th-Century Romantic style with the heroic drama of his symphonies and the inwardness of his late piano and string music.

Shostakovich, too, whose Piano Quintet in G Minor concluded the program, is very much part of the narrative tradition, indeed perhaps its last great exponent. There is a notable exception in his compositional career, however: the years 1938-40, following the triumph of his Fifth Symphony and preceding the Nazi invasion of Russia. During these years, Shostakovich turned to a style marked by neoclassical devices and a cooler emotional tone, exemplified in the First String Quartet, the Sixth Symphony and the Piano Quintet. As with several turns in Shostakovich’s career, it marked a road not taken, or at least taken far, though he recalled it again in the Ninth Symphony (1945) and the Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues of his Opus 87 (1950-52).

An oasis in Stalin’s Russia

The Piano Quintet was immediately popular, and, winning a Stalin Prize, marked what seemed a complete rehabilitation after the Soviet press attacks on Shostakovich in the mid-1930s that had threatened his career, if not his life. It was in fact only a reprieve, for the attacks were renewed after the war, and extended to virtually the entire Soviet musical establishment. The Piano Quintet therefore represents an oasis of sorts, in which Shostakovich invokes a more serene world with broad, open-spaced chords and ebullient fugal writing. Even the deeply lyrical intermezzo, with its appassionato climax, remains contained within formal structures, and the (mostly) extroverted finale, which follows without pause on a few bars of piano transition, brings the work to a graceful conclusion. Lydia Artymiw performed the keyboard part boldly and forcefully, yet with the requisite delicacy when called for.

It may or may not have been the Quartet’s intention in choosing its program, but each of the three works it performed ended diminuendo, with an almost casual shrug. It’s the way good conversation does end, not with a point proved but with many perspectives savored.



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