The Michelangelo Quartet makes its Philadelphia debut

I think you can say the same for Beethoven. Bach represents timeless introspection, and Mozart timeless grace, but Beethoven is not only matchless in the way they were — he is also one step ahead of everyone else, and therefore the foremost contemporary of every age.

The point was made again by the recent recital of the Michelangelo Quartet, a group whose name invokes another pretty big figure. The quartet was only now making its Philadelphia début under the auspices of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, but it has been prominent in Europe since its formation in 2002. The program included three substantial works: a late one by Franz Joseph Haydn and early-middle compositions by Shostakovich and Beethoven.

Beethoven provides the link

Haydn’s Quartet in G. Op. 77, No. 1, is the antepenultimate of his 80-odd string quartets. Like all his mature quartets, it is of unflagging quality and inventiveness, and of a sophistication that never fails to impress and delight: an invitation to conversation at the highest, most engaging, and most civilized level. This piece and its Op. 77 companion, the Quartet in F, were composed in 1799, and in a sense they bid farewell to the aristocratic culture of the 18th century. Thanks to them and the other Haydn quartet sets, we can always return to it with pleasure, but they are not merely retrospective, and they would teach much to the one-time student of Haydn’s who was publishing his own first quartet series that same year: Beethoven.

Dmitri Shostakovich kept a bust of Beethoven by his piano, and the link between the two men was deep. Beethoven composed a piano concerto, the Emperor, in a city under siege, Vienna, and Shostakovich a symphony in another besieged city, Leningrad. Beethoven suffered the ruin of his hopes for one revolution, and Shostakovich for another. Beethoven labored under the tragedy of his deafness, a suffering that never left him; Shostakovich lived virtually his entire adult life under a reign of terror that occasionally eased but never ceased.

Intimate ruminations

Shostakovich came relatively late to the quartet form, but his closest association to Beethoven would be through it. Beethoven composed 16 quartets, and his last thoughts in the medium were his profoundest; Shostakovich composed 15, and his late quartets, too, contain his most intimate ruminations. The Third Quartet, which the Michelangelo performed, was, after the Ninth Symphony, his first major postwar composition, and it bears a strong structural resemblance to the wartime Eighth Symphony, albeit on a smaller scale.

The Third is significant in another respect, too: It was virtually the last serious composition Shostakovich dared to expose to public view in the years between its composition in 1946 and Stalin’s death in 1953. The First Violin Concerto, the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, and the Fourth and Fifth string quartets were all relegated to the drawer during the renewed cultural purges of Stalin’s last years. The Third Quartet was not a requiem for Shostakovich’s muse, but for a time it seemed that it might be.

A different sonic and spiritual universe

Shostakovich is modern, but Beethoven, as I say, is contemporary. The Michelangelo concluded its recital with the middle of the three quartets of his Op. 59 that we owe to that incomparable musical benefactor, Count Andrey Razumovsky. They were composed in 1806, just seven years after Haydn’s Op. 77 pair, but they inhabit a different sonic and spiritual universe, even among Beethoven’s own works.

The Op. 59, No. 1 Quartet in F is starkly different from its Op. 18 predecessors, and for that matter anything else written before it. If anything, the Op. 59, No. 2 in E minor reaches even loftier heights, particularly in the great E-flat Adagio. Beethoven himself would not achieve anything comparable to it until the late piano and quartet works a decade and a half later. The movements that frame it are also, by comparison with anything that had come before them, fierce in their complexity and exalted in their energy. For all the changes of style, the complications of rhythm, and the nuances of coloring that have come since in the repertory of the string quartet, this music is as challenging to the listener, if less confounding and strange, than at its very first performances. This is what it means to be contemporary.

A solid debut

The Michelangelo Quartet’s strongest players are its cellist, Helmerson, an international soloist in his own right, and its splendid violist, Nobuko Imai. First violinist Mihaela Martin had a rawness of sound and intonation at the start of some movements, but these were overcome, and her long-drawn pianissimo at the end of the Shostakovich Quartet was exquisite. That work could have used some of the more robust shaping that Russian ensembles often give it, and some sharper profiling, too, for example in the abrupt transformation of the Haydnesque tune that opens the first movement. These caveats aside, though, the Quartet’s début was solid, and a return engagement would be welcome.