Takács Quartet at the Perelman

The Takács Quartet performed one Romantic classic and two modern ones in its Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital at the Perelman Theater. Schubert's 13th Quartet, D. 804, inaugurates his great late chamber music phase, which would include the 14th and 15th Quartets, the Piano Sonatas D. 845, 850, 894, and 958-960, the Piano Trios D. 898 and 929, and the String Quintet, D. 956. All of these (with much else, of course) were composed in the final four years of Schubert's life.

In contrast, Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Quintet, Op. 57, essentially inaugurated his career as a chamber music composer, for— piano music aside— he had composed only an early trio, two pieces for string octet, a cello sonata, and a very brief string quartet prior to it as against half a dozen symphonies, a pair of full-length operas, several ballets, a concerto and a great deal of film music.

For both composers, then, the works offered by the Takács, with Marc-André Hamelin as pianist, were pivotal. Shostakovich never revisited the medium of the quintet, but he was to write a total of 15 string quartets as well as three more sonatas, a second piano trio, and a cycle of 24 preludes and fugues for piano— a level of chamber music production rivaled by none of his peers and contemporaries.

Britten's valediction

The other work on the Takács program, still little known in the U.S., was Benjamin Britten's Third Quartet, Op. 94, the composer's valediction— he was wheelchair-bound when he wrote it, and only heard it privately performed before his death in December 1976. It held its own beside the masterpieces that bracketed it on the program, and with the passage of time may become as well known. It certainly deserves to be.

The links between the three works, different as they were in style and mood, gave the recital a unity that might have appeared lacking on the surface. Schubert drew material for his Quartet from his ballet Rosamunde, whose entr'acte theme appeared both here and in the set of Piano Impromptus composed in the last year of his life. Britten similarly used themes from his opera Death in Venice in the Third Quartet, itself written on a last trip to that city.

The other powerful influence on the Britten Quartet was the late quartets of Shostakovich. The two men had become close and mutually admiring friends, and Britten would have heard at least some of the Shostakovich quartets when they were played by the Fitzwilliam Quartet during the latter's visit to England in the early 1970s (and no doubt earlier, as the Shostakovich quartet cycle was esteemed in England long before it caught on in the U.S.). Shostakovich predeceased Britten in 1975, and it's reasonable to imagine Britten conceiving his own quartet—his first in nearly 30 years— as an homage to Shostakovich as well as a personal leave-taking.

Abrupt mood changes

The five-movement structure of the Britten Quartet, with a pair of scherzo-like inner movements providing interludes to the three more meditative ones that frame them, has also been likened to some of the later works of Bartok and Mahler. But to this listener, the deeply mysterious and often introspective character of the music as a whole seems not only an extension of but a kind of coda to the late Shostakovich quartets (11-15), all of which similarly employ fragmentary materials, abrupt changes of mood, and unusual harmonic figuration and bowing.

(The Shostakovich 14th Quartet, too, harks back to lyric material from his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, just as Britten's recalls his music for Aeschenbach, the protagonist of Death in Venice.)

The heart of the Britten Quartet is the third movement, marked "Solo: Very Calm," which is essentially a recitative for the first violin— another Shostakovichian device— while the Finale is a passacaglia whose bass line is carried in the cello, culminating in a brief surge on the instrument that carries the music into silence. This is music with more questions than answers; but that's the way of music edging toward the last silence of the grave.

Perfunctory Schubert

The Takács Quartet was founded in 1975 in Budapest, the home of the Budapest Strong Quartet, once the world's most famous quartet. Two of the Takács Quarter's members— second violinist Károly Schranz and cellist András Fejér— remain from the original group; Edward Dusinberre has been its first violin since the mid-1990s; and more recently it has added its first female member, violist Geraldine Walther. Its reputation remains high.

I was surprised to hear what seemed to me a perfunctory performance of the Schubert, the notes in place but energy and conviction lacking. It was almost as if another group emerged from backstage to play Britten, however, with a notable improvement in wattage from Dusinberre, who carried his critical part with exquisite refinement and deep if restrained emotion. His sound isn't large or dominant, but it can carry when played, as it was here, with acute sensibility and technique.

In Stalin's shadow

The Shostakovich Piano Quintet that concluded the program is the culminating work of a brief neoclassical period (1938-40) that includes the composer's First Quartet and Sixth Symphony. Shostakovich's reputation was still recovering (not for the first time, nor the last) from the brutal denunciation of Lady Macbeth in a belated Pravda article.

In those days of Stalin's Great Terror, a bad review could mean a ticket to Siberia or worse, and for a time Shostakovich kept a suitcase packed by his door in anticipation of a midnight visit from the secret police. This was no exaggerated fear; Shostakovich's patron and protector, Marshal Tukachevsky, was among those tortured and executed (Tukachevsky's blood can still be seen on the "confession" he signed).

Shostakovich made a triumphant return to favor with his Fifth Symphony; but his Sixth, originally conceived as on ode to Lenin but wholly without a program when delivered, was coolly received. The Piano Quintet was thus a critical element in his rehabilitation. It was hailed as a major work, and received the Stalin Prize.

Mischievous wink

It's hard to imagine any music of substance and ambition being written under such circumstances, let alone the boldly conceived Piano Quintet, with the striking, chorale-like piano line that opens it (exceptionally played by Marc-André Hamelin).

The last three of its five movements are played without pause, including the Lento that, like the corresponding slow movement in the Britten Quartet, features a recitative-like line for the first violin. The music verges on tragedy here but picks up again to end in high spirits, with a mischievous wink at the end.

Even for so mercurial a temperament as Shostakovich, the play of mood within an overall unity of structure is extraordinary. Britten, too, would subsequently resort to Baroque form in the Third Quartet, and figures as disparate as Schoenberg and Stravinsky would also find in classical tradition a frame for radical innovation.

With the distance of time, "modern" music— that, roughly, of the first half of the 20th Century— comes increasingly to seem a variation on 18th-Century tradition. Elliott Carter, who recently left us, extended this spare, often astringent sensibility into our own time. Plus ça change . . .