1807 & Friends play Brahms and Mozart

Brahms and Mozart get their just desserts

DAN COREN

As you may have noticed, I harbor a special liking for chamber music. The top three slots in my mental list of Dan Coren’s All-Time Classical Hits have been occupied for decades by Mozart’s G minor String Quintet, Schubert’s C Major String Quintet, and Beethoven’s Archduke Piano Trio, all in a dead heat for first place. The rest of the list changes over time, but as a rule, I have to scan down quite a long way— through various Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert quartets, trios, and sonatas— until I reach an orchestral work.

Nothing against the Beethoven Sixth Symphony or the Mahler Second. It’s just that the quality of the classical chamber music repertory is so high.

This week, the Brahms C minor Piano Quartet, Op. 60, and the Mozart E-flat major Piano Quartet, K. 493, have jumped into the top ten, propelled there by the 1807 and Friends concert at the Academy of Vocal Arts. As I’ve already written on this site, this was an opportunity to hear some of Philadelphia’s most accomplished veteran chamber musicians (violinist Nancy Bean, violist Pamela Fay, cellist Lloyd Smith, and the ubiquitous pianist Marcantonio Barone) play masterpieces that are performed far too rarely.

In fact, I was a bit alarmed at how very much I looked forward to this event. “Come on, Dan, it’s only a concert!” I told myself on Monday afternoon, when I found myself humming Brahms and beseeching the fates to resist drowsiness that evening. Well, my prayers were answered. I heard every second of music with rapt attention. The only fly in the ointment was that the concert eventually ended.

Something in common with Charles Dickens

As I listened to the Mozart, I thought of something Virginia Woolf wrote about Dickens: “His books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.”

Substitute “compositions” for “books” and “melodies” for “people,” and you have a perfect description of Mozart’s style, and especially of K. 493. Not that Mozart’s plots (i.e., his formal structures)— miraculously perfect vehicles for his inexhaustible musical wit— need any tightening or sharpening.

This group played with such conversational intimacy, so fully in the spirit of the style, that you could easily imagine Mozart smiling approvingly in the wings. He would have been especially pleased, I imagine, by the fact that every single repeat sign he had taken the trouble to write was observed– not just the two in the first movement (a rare treat in itself) but even the second repeat in the heavenly slow movement. (I’m not sure, but I think I heard Barone take advantage of that second repeat and play some subtly cool jazz-like embellishments.)

I can’t stress sufficiently what a joy it was to hear Mozart’s intentions honored like this. Hearing everything go around twice changes the psychological impact of Mozart’s forms, especially of the glorious codas that end both movements. Played this way, the quartet became luxuriantly immense, as long as the Eroica Symphony, and, astonishingly, longer than the Brahms Opus 60.

Thought-provoking Brahms, on its musical merits alone

There’s something about the Brahms C Minor Piano Quartet that makes musicians and musical scholars run on and on. Perhaps it’s because we know that Brahms struggled mightily with it and apparently thought of it as an especially tragic work. (He wrote an early version in 1855, put it aside, and entirely recast it— how or why, nobody knows— 20 years later.) Perhaps it’s because the work is so damn thought-provoking on its musical merits alone. Opus 60 could easily serve as the grand climax of a course on the history of sonata-form. In this context, juxtaposed to the Mozart’s coolness and grace, Brahms’s somber intensity and rigor could hardly have been more evident. It was amazing to hear how much power and lyricism Brahms could economically cram into this massive but compressed juggernaut of a work.

(I can’t resist asking: how come nobody has ever tried to connect the Brahms Second Piano Concerto with this work? They sure seem to share a lot in common— not in mood, perhaps, but in the way they’re assembled. Anyone want to take me up on this?)

A word about the audience

So here was a concert given on a Monday night, a concert not under the aegis of an organization like the Kimmel Center, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society or Astral Artistic Services– a concert whose only draw was good musicians playing wonderful (albeit somewhat esoteric) repertory. What sort of audience, I wondered, would a concert like this attract?

I should have known. About a hundred listeners showed up, nearly enough to fill the AVA's intimate Helen Corning Warden Theater. I’m 64 years old; I’m fairly sure that 80% of the audience, to be conservative, was at least ten years my senior. With the exception of four very young folks sitting directly behind me (Curtis students, I suspect), I didn’t see a single person who appeared to be between the ages of 30 and 50. In short, a slightly exaggerated version of the usual Philadelphia chamber music audience: elderly, musically sophisticated (judging by the conversations I heard around me) and warmly appreciative.

At first I wondered who would be left to attend a concert like this ten years from now. But upon further reflection, this state of affairs seems to have persisted for the nearly 40 years I’ve lived in Philadelphia. How can this be?

Two possibilities come to mind. Perhaps a taste for chamber music develops with the wisdom of age. Or (my preference) perhaps sonata form in its purest manifestations is a sort of super anti-oxidant containing as yet unrecognized life-prolonging properties. If people were to begin listening to the most sophisticated works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms in their 30s, they might live to be 200. Who knows? It’s certainly worth a try.