Musicians from Marlboro at the Perelman

Musicians from Marlboro is a movable feast that features 25 young artists selected by the Marlboro Festival's directors, Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida, to tour the U.S. with concerts that run the gamut of the classical repertory and offer a wide range of chamber formats. The recital was the group's third visit to Philadelphia since October.

Despite the changing cast of characters— which means, among other things, that the performers lack the easy familiarity that comes only with being part of an established group— Marlboro maintains a very high standard, and it brought off a challenging program with vigor and panache.

Igor Stravinsky isn't particularly noted as a chamber music composer, which has always struck me as a bit odd, given his penchant for clear sonorities and distinctly articulated musical lines. His 1920 Concertino for String Quartet, a highly compressed work (only six minutes long), shows what Stravinsky might have produced had he devoted more time to writing for four strings.

Does music express emotion?

It's a taut, aggressive work with stabbing chords, fierce interplay, and no concession to the lyric qualities of stringed instruments: Stravinsky even insisted that the first string not be bowed, to remove any temptation in that direction. No one was writing music like this, but its astringency was soon picked up by Bartok and others.

Stravinsky famously said that music expresses no emotion. Well, yes— music is a succession of individual notes that express nothing except in the context of other notes, just as reading a dictionary of all the words used by Shakespeare in Hamlet does not get you the play itself. In the 1950s, a group of composers took Stravinsky at his word and produced music according to mathematical formulae without regard for the actual sound it made. No one listens to it today.

Stravinsky certainly didn't write that way. His Concertino contains plenty of concentrated thought and feeling, although it's not reducible to anything but itself. Music isn't a denotative language (onomatopoeic essays like The Flight of the Bumblebee notwithstanding). If Stravinsky had to think of himself as a cold fish to write music that delights the mind and nourishes the spirit, so be it.

Britten's farewell

The four young female performers— Bella Hristova, Danbi Um, Hsin-Tun Huang, and Angela Park— attacked the Concertino with zest, and then returned to perform a diametrically different work: Benjamin Britten's Third Quartet. It's a concert rarity, but then none of the Britten quartets gets much attention on this side of the Pond. Since it's a work that requires multiple hearings, it was a fortunate happenstance that it appeared last fall as well in a performance by the Takacs Quartet. Both the earlier performance and this one were sensitive and probing.

Britten was in failing health when he composed the music in 1975; he died the following year. As I noted in a previous review, the Third Quartet exudes a valedictory feel, much like the late quartets of Shostakovich that served in part as Britten's model. The two composers shared a deep kinship, although not a note written by either could be mistaken for the work of the other.

Stravinsky wanted his music to be immediately accessible in the sense that it's all out there at once, with a minimum of shading and no portamento. Britten's music, especially in this work, is all about personal expressiveness, although this most reticent of composers rarely wears his heart on his sleeve. The textures are spare, sometimes to the point of ethereality.

Meaning of life

From a formal point of view, Britten's Third Quartet has a classic five-movement structure in the manner of Beethoven's A minor Quartet and the Bartok Fifth, with two scherzi separating a first movement framed by duets in every possible combination, a slow movement featuring a solo violin, and a Recitative and Passacaglia that fades away quietly at the end.

It's indeed music that, as Britten himself puts it, "ends with a question"— the same question posed by Shostakovich in his last Quartet, composed in the year previous to the Britten Third, and also lapsing into what seems a terminal silence at the end. It is not only the question that seems most obvious— what lies beyond the grave for those facing it?— but also a retrospective issue: What has a life meant as it reaches its term?

Britten provides some clue in the quotations and passages of yearning from his opera, Death in Venice, which haunt the Third Quartet. Shostakovich did something similar in quoting the love aria from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in his Fourteenth Quartet. Britten would have known this work and appreciated its coded meanings for his good friend.

The young Brahms

The recital concluded on an altogether different note, as the anxious tensions of Stravinsky and Britten gave way to the largely sunny amplitude of the young Johannes Brahms.

Brahms was 28 when he completed the Piano Quartet in A, Op. 26, actually the last of his three essays in the form (although the third one bears the opus number 60.) Schumann's Piano Quartet, Op. 47, would have been an obvious precursor, along of course with the two Mozart Quartets K. 478 and K. 493. But the Brahms Piano Quartets set the Romantic standard.

Like all of his larger-scaled chamber works, it has symphonic scope, although in fact it's perfectly suited to the precise instrumental combination for which Brahms designed it. Arnold Schoenberg made that point in a disastrously negative way with his misconceived orchestration of the G minor Piano Quartet, Op, 25.

The Brahms A major is set in four spacious movements that spanned 50 minutes in the Marlboro's unhurried performance. Schubert's music was just being rediscovered, and in some instances played for the first time in the 1860s, and Brahms's chamber works display a similar breadth.

Summer slump

It's healthy music in the most positive sense, with none of the brooding that characterized some of Brahms's later work, but with the meaty intellectual substance that marks almost all of it, as well as a through-composed style in which rhythmic and thematic germs persist from movement to movement. It was a perfect work, in short, to close a chamber music season of many and varied pleasures.

Of the performers, only violist Hsin-Tin Huang returned from the first part of the program, with Emilie-Ann Gendron and Gabriel Cabezas filling the other string chairs, and Matan Porat the very able pianist.

Philadelphia could certainly use more art music over the summer, but the Philadelphia Orchestra turns into the Philly Pops over those months, and the season of drought is nearly upon us. Of course, you can always trek up to Vermont and hear the Marlboro musicians in their native habitat. There's plenty of good music around. Just not much of it here.