Artemis Quartet at the Perelman

The Brahms First Symphony was, notoriously, a work long in gestation. Although Berlioz and Liszt had stretched the parameters of the symphony in forging a Romantic style, Beethoven remained for Brahms the master against whom all subsequent symphonic music was to be measured. This made Brahms to a degree a classicist — a point lodged against him by admirers of his great rival Wagner.

Some sons rebel against their fathers by rejecting them, some by trying to compete with them on their own ground. Brahms clearly fell into the latter group, and when some critics jokingly referred to his First Symphony as Beethoven’s Tenth, the backhanded compliment struck home.

Tonal lapses

What’s less well appreciated is that, for Brahms, Beethoven’s chamber music presented no less a challenge. The First String Quartet, like the First Symphony in C minor, was also long in the making: It was begun in 1865 but not completed until 1873. By that time, Brahms had already composed two string sextets, a piano quintet, three piano quartets, and a piano trio, all grand in scope. But Beethoven’s signature chamber form was the string quartet, and measuring up to the master’s model was again a daunting challenge.

The influence of Beethoven is clear in the Brahms Op. 51, No. 1, particularly in the debt of its second-movement Romanze to the late Beethoven quartets. The Artemis Quartet’s sensitive rendering of the Romanze made the affinity clear, but in other respects the performance left more than a little to be desired. Part of this was due to the raw sound and tonal lapses of first violinist Vineta Sareika, the group’s only woman, but the ensemble as a whole lacked force and projection through much of the performance, only digging in properly with the concluding Allegro.

The program concluded with late Beethoven: the Quartet in C# Minor, Op. 131, one of his grandest masterpieces. At this point, Beethoven was reinventing the genre with virtually every new work he composed and with a splendid disregard for all previous conceptions of sound and design. His Opus 130 Bb Quartet had run to six movements instead of the traditional four, concluding in its original version with a 17-minute fugue. Opus 131 has seven movements, beginning not with the usual sonata-form Allegro (as Brahms did in his First Quartet), but with a slow fugue that would embody the tonal design of the entire work.

A movement every minute

The problem here with the Artemis performance can perhaps be traced back to the middle work on the program: the contemporary composer György Kurtág’s Quartet No. 1, Op. 28 (Officium breve). It was preceded by explanatory comments from cellist Eckart Runge that stressed the exceptional pianissimos called for in the score. The Quartet did indeed bring them off very well, with Sareika’s violin in much better form. The problem, however, was that the Quartet seemed so enamored of its own effects that it brought them to Beethoven too, reducing him to an all but bodiless whisper at certain points.

Whatever else one may say about Beethoven, even at his most ethereal and refined, his is a music that speaks through the body, and you don’t play him like Debussy or Fauré. As with Brahms (and Kurtág), the Artemis could project proper volume when it wished; what was missing in all but a few moments was the ruggedness and urgency that’s so critical to Beethoven’s voice.

With Kurtág, we enter a postmodern realm. If Beethoven’s seven-movement Quartet was revolutionary, Kurtág offers no fewer than 15 movements, all within a span of 15 minutes. The inspiration here is clearly the miniaturist Anton Webern, whose own music is freely quoted and reworked in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and tenth movements. In Webern, every note signifies, so that an entire musical narrative can be compressed into a minute or two.

Kurtág’s elegiac score— it’s dedicated to the memory of his Hungarian compatriot Endre Szervánszky— plays, as Runge indicated, with pianissimos just this side of silence that alternate with fortissimo outbursts. The work concludes with a Larghetto based on Szervánszky’s own music. Despite its fragmentary structure, it made a gravely unified impression, and the Artemis was at its best in it. Would that Brahms and Beethoven had fared as well.