American String Quartet with Lydia Artymiw

Slava, farewell

ROBERT ZALLER

It’s rare when a concert's most poignant moment comes during the encore, but so it was on May 2 when the American String Quartet and pianist Lydia Artymiw performed in one of this year’s closing Chamber Music Society events. The encore, which came after a substantial and largely satisfying program, was the slow movement of the Brahms Piano Quintet, and what made it memorable was the group’s dedication of it to the late Mstislav Rostropovich.

Rostropovich’s death last month had not been unexpected, but it was nonetheless a shock— how could it not be? Slava was our Orpheus, and the wondrous lyre he had made of his cello was the world’s greatest singing instrument. He had seldom played it publicly of late, but the memory of it, in recordings but also (for those of us fortunate to have heard it in concert) in one’s own tissue, was indelible.

I remember such a concert, some decades back, when Leonard Bernstein made a late appearance at a Rostropovich recital in New York. Lenny arrived in an opera cape and stood profoundly disappointed when no one paid the slightest attention to his entry. The audience was listening to Slava play.

A shaggily eccentric uncle

Rostropovich is part of Philadelphia’s musical history, too. It was at the Academy of Music that he gave the Western premiere of the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto, an event as important politically as it was musically in those Cold War years. Rostropovich left Russia in the 1970s (after being penalized for sheltering the beleaguered Alexander Solzhenitsyn), began a second career as a conductor, and became a familiar figure in the West. In later years he was a beloved if shaggily eccentric uncle, with his bald, beaming head, his broken English, and the outsized passion he brought to everything he did, so at variance (like Bernstein’s) with the Germanic formality that still rules the podium. One heard less of the lyre. In the end, Russia took him back, and his life came full circle. A month from death, he called himself the happiest man alive.

Ms. Artymiw, who announced the dedication of the Brahms, made a simple gesture of it, and we all turned with it, as one does instinctively to an eclipse of the sun. Shorn of its accompanying movements, the slow movement of the F minor had a subdued, almost lullaby-like quality. It was the perfect elegy for Slava.

Haydn, late in his game but still on top of it

The rest of the program featured work that, while hardly novel, is not over-familiar. The last of Haydn’s Op. 76 Erdody quartets opened the program. It shows the master, late in his game but still on top of it, substituting a theme and variations for the usual sonata form of the opening movement, experimenting with rhythmic and accentual shifts, and producing a deep, lovely Adagio. The more one ponders Haydn, indeed, the more mysterious he seems. How can someone be so unfailingly sane and orderly, yet never repetitious, never predictable and never dull?

The Shostakovich Third Quartet filled out the program’s first half. Composed in 1946, it contains clear affinities to his Eighth Symphony, written three years earlier. Both consist of five movements, with paired scherzos, a slow movement (Largo in the symphony, Adagio in the quartet) that’s the heart of each work, and a twisting finale that, recalling the theme of an earlier movement in its climax, subsides to a quiet, ambiguous close.

The tragic import persists

The symphony, of course, is profoundly identified with Russia’s wartime experience, and the quartet’s movements originally bore titles that suggested a similar provenance. No doubt this is an appropriate reading, but music of any quality will tell its own tale, and latter-day audiences will take Shostakovich as they take Haydn: as a play of sound. On these terms, the Third Quartet is one of Shostakovich’s most extended and ambitious, though its tragic import will hardly escape the listener.

I thought the American Quartet a bit dry and pinched here, though certainly up to the work’s formal challenges. Yet it brought the finale to a particularly hushed and compelling close that sized up everything that had gone before.

A faded Hungarian sensation

Erno Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet, Op. 1, closed the program. Dohnanyi was the eldest of the three major Hungarian composers who emerged, nearly 70 years after Liszt, at the turn of the 20th Century. Bartok, of course, has eclipsed both Dohnanyi and Kodaly, but that was by no means clear from the beginning. Dohnanyi’s Quintet caused a sensation when it appeared in 1895; the composer was only 18, but perhaps only Mendelssohn had enjoyed a debut with a work of such rich expressiveness and maturity. Brahms himself welcomed it enthusiastically— as well he might have, for it is thoroughly Brahmsian in spirit despite the Hungarian stamp of the faster movements. This takes nothing away from the piece itself, but does give it a peculiar cast, as if the 62-year-old German had mysteriously taken residence in a precocious teenager’s head.

Today we can take it as a specimen of late Romanticism, not unlike the early works of Bartok himself. But Dohnanyi, like most composers born in the 1870s (with the obvious exception of Schoenberg), remained more or less content with the idiom of his youth, though in time he threw off that Brahmsian accent. Stravinsky was the real point of demarcation, and even his 1905 Symphony could pass for lesser Tchaikovsky with ease.

The American Quartet and the estimable Ms. Artymiw dug into the Dohnanyi score with obvious relish, and brought it off rousingly. If it is no longer a repertory piece, it is far more than a curiosity, and it was good to have it back in circulation.