PCMS presents the Modigliani Quartet

The longest work on the program was the first, Mozart’s Quartet No. 15 in D Minor (K. 421). Mozart was keen on the form as a young prodigy, composing his first 13 works in the medium while still in his mid-teens. As you’d imagine, they are precocious examples of genius, and several hint of a maturity to come. Mozart abandoned the form abruptly after K. 173, however, not to return to it until the age of 26 in 1782, having achieved full mastery both of the form and of his art. The Quartet in G (K. 387) would be the first of six works grouped as the Haydn Quartets — Mozart was deeply influenced by Haydn, and dedicated this set of works to him. The admiration was mutual, and it was of these works that Haydn famously remarked to Leopold Mozart that his son Wolfgang Amadeus was the greatest composer he knew.

The G major Quartet is striking in its chromaticism and in its unusual placement of the traditional minuet as the second rather than the third movement. K. 421 is even more strikingly innovative, both in its half-hour length and its dark and agitated minor key. Haydn had composed minor-key symphonies in his Sturm und Drang period, but no quartet like this, or, with the exception of his Op. 42, one nearly as long. Mozart himself would never again use a minor key as the signature of a string quartet. There are lighter, contrasting moments in the work, particularly in the relaxed trio of the minuet, but the prevailing mood is more urgent and emotionally troubled than anything he had ever written previously. At the same time, of course — being Mozart — it is elegantly and supremely beautiful as well.

Uncharacteristically sunny

I missed in the Modigliani’s performance a real grasp of K. 421’s intensity, and sensed some tonal lapses as well. Dimitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 1, which brought the program to intermission, went better. Had Shostakovich lived no longer than Mozart, this work would have been his sole essay in the form. Coming between his dramatic Fifth Symphony and his problematic Sixth, it seems a sunny interval, insofar as anything written in 1938, the year of Munich and the Yezhovshchina purges in Russia, can seem to have a bucolic air. To be sure, there are undercurrents in this 15-minute work — Shostakovich seemed incapable of putting two notes together that don’t suggest an unstated third — but for the most part it is lyrical if not placid. Perhaps the composer’s mood was linked to the birth that year of his son, Maxim, as the Mozart K. 421 is said to have been to the accouchement of his wife Costanze?

In any case, the quartet was on firmer ground in this music, with violist Loic Rio exceptionally expressive in unfolding the long, winding theme of the quartet’s slow movement. They were first-rate in the program’s concluding work, Beethoven’s Serioso Quartet, Op. 95. This work has some of the relentless drive of the neighboring Seventh Symphony, Op.92, but it is offers a concentration and concision never before seen in Beethoven, and consequently anyone else.

What never ceases to astonish in Beethoven is the way he reinvented the major genres of abstract musical composition — the symphony, the concerto, the sonata and variation form — not once, but over and over again. There is little point to talking about the advent of Romanticism in Beethoven, and the overthrow of classical proportion and design in favor of broader expressiveness. This quartet is furioso as well as serioso, but still contained within classical form. That’s what makes it such a wonder.

The Perelman audience responded with great and deserved enthusiasm to the Modigliani’s performance, and with pleasure to the encores that showed off more relaxed aspects of their virtuosity. I could have sworn I had heard two different quartets over the course of the evening. But even a good group can have an off night. Fortunately, the Modigliani ended this one at their best.