The Dover Quartet at the Kimmel Center

The Dover’s recital began with Mozart’s Quartet K. 589, a last-minute substitution for the scheduled performance of the “Hunt” Quartet, K. 458. I was looking forward to the latter — as a general rule, program changes should only be made on an emergency basis: An announced program is a contract with its patrons, and should be honored. But, from the opening notes of K. 589, the quartet displayed such felicity of tone and coordination that no one could be wishing to hear anything else.

K. 589 is Mozart’s penultimate quartet and shows him a keen student of the late Haydn quartets, with their rich contrapuntal sonorities, internal syncopations, and ever-fresh extensions of the possibilities of sonata form. Mozart does show an incipient Romanticism in such works as the quartets K. 387 and 421 and the piano concertos K. 466 and 491, and it is harder to predict where his art might have gone had he been granted longer life. But it is interesting to find him in his last quartets and concertos pondering his old master Haydn (who had his Sturm und Drang period too), and finding fresh inspiration for himself in him.

The Dover’s performance was limpid in its clarity and feather-soft in its delicacy, with each overlapping line clearly articulated. A note or two went astray in the opening Allegro, but that was the only lapse I caught. The movement of K. 589 that pushes boundaries most is the minuet, which in its vigor and complexity of design seemed almost scherzolike, but was still finally classical in feeling. The main theme of the concluding Allegro assai jumped out of a surprise box after it with its lightness and wit, another Haydnesque twist, and the Dover brought the work to a close in a rush of delight.

Music of the night

The other two works on the program both evoked themes of night, though in very different ways. Twentieth-century French composer Henri Dutilleux remains a musician’s musician, with his combination of formal rigor and delicacy of timbre, though he is starting to get the wider attention he deserves. His Ainsi la nuit (Thus the Night) was his only string quartet, following in the rather peculiar French tradition of Franck, Chausson, Debussy, Ravel, and Roussel, each of whom also composed a single work in the form. (Saint-Saëns did write two quartets, though the first came only in his mid-sixties.)

Dutilleux himself was 60 when he finished Ainsi la nuit. He seems to have approached it as someone making a contribution to a weighty tradition, and, as Camden Shaw noted in his pre-performance comments, he immersed himself in the literature from Beethoven to Berg before setting out on composition. Bartók’s night pieces were a clear inspiration as well, and so, from a different medium, was van Gogh’s Starry Night.

The result was an uninterrupted 18-minute work in seven pithy sections, with four brief interludes — Dutilleux calls them parentheses — after each of the first four sections.

As with Webern, there is much refinement but also sudden contrasts in sound, as of a story being told — or a succession of moods reflected — with elliptical brevity. The germ of the work is a chord consisting of open fifths piled one atop the other by each of the four instruments, and the same chord brings it to a juddering close. It’s music that needs repeated hearing, but even as a series of sonic events it is continually engrossing, and whether Mr. Shaw will be right in his prediction that it will ultimately take its place beside the Debussy and Ravel quartets in the repertory, it is a welcome addition to it. The Dover certainly gave it splendid advocacy.

Romanticism on steroids

Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, which concluded the program, is a quite different take on the theme of the nocturnal. It is also a stylistic universe away from Dutilleux’s pointillistic precision: Call it Romanticism on steroids, with its dense chromaticism and heart-on-sleeve sentiment. Based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, it depicts a woman who confesses her pregnancy by another man to the lover who walks beside her under moonlight, and the love that then “transfigures” them both.

In form, the work approximates a tone poem. Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, composed a decade earlier, was clearly a model, although the Strauss work is for full orchestra and Transfigured Night was here presented in its original string sextet form, with cellist Peter Wiley and violist Steven Tenenbom ably complementing the Dover’s forces. Although usually presented now in Schoenberg’s arrangement for string orchestra, it’s a stronger piece in its leaner form — in fact, a masterpiece — and the hushed duet between first violinist Link and violist Pajaro-van de Stadt before the final climax of the score was as magical a moment as one is apt to hear this season. In fact, it is hard to imagine this work better realized by anyone, and the Perelman audience thrilled to it. How often can one say that about a performance of Schoenberg?