Anthony McGill with the Musicians from Marlboro

The evening warmed up with Beethoven’s String Trio, Op. 9, No. 3, with violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron, violist Daniel Kim, and cellist Marcy Rosen. The former two are, respectively, members of the Momenta and Senza Misura quartets, while the seasoned Ms. Rosen, a Curtis graduate, has had a distinguished career since her solo debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Beethoven’s string trios tend to get short shrift compared to the quartets, but the Opus 9 set, composed in 1797-1798, when Beethoven already had his first two piano concertos behind him, shows him as a master of the chamber medium. Beethoven was still finding his mature voice, and the influence of Haydn shows here — including, in Op. 9, No. 3, a false ending midway through the opening Allegro con spirito.

The music is launched with a four-note phrase that indicates great confidence in getting right into the substance of what the composer wants to say, as if to tell us that he not only knows his own mind but has also already assimilated the most forward-looking music of his time. It’s fascinating to hear Beethoven’s own accents breaking through, too, in abrupt, stabbing phrases that have both the urgency and the humor of a young man confidently embarked on his way. The un-miked sound of the players took a little bit of adjustment, but that was soon settled, and a very good time was had by performers and audience alike.

Après avant-garde

Krzysztof Penderecki has one of those Polish first names that defies you to spell it. Now in his 80s, he has been the acknowledged dean of Polish music since the passing of Witold Lutosławski. In 1959, at the age of 26, his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima made him an international figure, both for its boldly original and intense string writing and for its political statement on a subject no Western composer would touch. For about a decade, Penderecki was regarded as part of the European avant-garde, and his St. Luke Passion continued his reflection on the horrors of World War II.

Like many other composers after 1970, however, he settled into a more eclectic and accessible style — similar to what happened in the 1920s and 1930s with such composers as Bartók, Hindemith, and Stravinsky. His work has been performed less frequently in the West since. This is unfortunate, for he has produced a varied and significant body of work including symphonies, concertos, and operas.

The composer’s 1993 Clarinet Quartet is one of his most impressively inward works. The only other major work in the genre I know is the virtuosic Clarinet Quartet by Hindemith, a young man’s brash and brilliant score. The Penderecki is altogether a different affair, beginning with a somber Notturno in which each instrument, beginning with the clarinet, enters on its own as if dipping a toe into very dark waters, and ending with an Abschied (Farewell) that gradually unwinds toward silence.

The reference to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in the movement’s title is not, I think, accidental, and the spareness and delicacy of the writing suggest Webern too, while the inner movements have a motoric energy that reflects Bartók and Hindemith. But the overall impression of the work is of a sadness beyond sadness, such as one finds in late Shostakovich. You don’t grow up in the Poland of the 1930s and 1940s without showing it. McGill’s clarinet — two of them, actually, one in A and the other in B-flat — was beautifully in tune with the music’s mood, and Emilie-Anne Gendron produced a ghostly, gossamer sound in her upper register that was quite wonderful.

Vital but valedictory

The Brahms Clarinet Quintet is, with its great Mozartean sister the Quintet K. 581, the summit of chamber literature for the clarinet. For all its warmth and vitality, though, it is more a work of actual leave-taking than Penderecki’s. Brahms always had a valedictory approach to his music, and from his middle years on was always giving the impression that his latest work would certainly be his last. His final compositions were mostly for one or two instruments, but the Clarinet Quintet, inspired like the companion Clarinet Trio, Op. 114 and the two sonatas of Op. 120 by the virtuoso Richard Mühlfeld, is a work both of chamber intimacy and symphonic scope — a trick at which Brahms was adept all his life, but which few composers can bring off.

The string complement was joined by violinist David McCarroll, and, with McGill again superb, there was evident pleasure among the performers as well as in the audience. At the end, Brahms brings back the principal theme of the opening Allegro in a rare nod to the cyclical technique of his great rival Wagner, as if to say, once more, “We’ve had fun; let’s pack up.” But, for all the vein of seriousness and trouble that runs through Brahms even at his lightest, there is no sense of regret in this score, but rather of passion rediscovered, even close to the end.