Out & About:
Mostly Mozart 2010 (II)
16 August 2010
The second and final evening of this year’s rendezvous with Mostly Mozart — a recital by the Emerson String Quartet at Alice Tully Hall — was not as delightful as the first. I’m convinced that it was the sight of a Con Ed emergency van parked outside our building, over the subway station construction site, that made me fretful as I headed for the West side. What would I come home to? Walking up seventeen flights of stairs? When the concert was over, the first thing I did, after calling Kathleen, was to call home, and, hopefully, to hear my voice on the answering machine. Everything was fine. But fretfulness spoiled the concert a bit.
As did the couple seated to my left, who, just before the second movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, moved over one seat. I have no idea why, but of course I assumed that there must be something offensive about my person. There was certainly something offensive about my sports jacket. I’d just had it back from the dry cleaner, and yet here was this strange blob of blue on the lapel.
Fretful.
The program began with five fugues from Bach’s second Well-Tempered Clavier collection that Mozart scored for string quartet in 1782, when he was new in town (Vienna) and a protégé of Baron van Swieten, possibly the most important connoisseur in the history of Western music. Mozart makes the point of the adaptation very clear: Bach’s dense polyphony is spaced out over four instrumental parts that make it much easier for fashionable listeners to grasp. I know more about this music than I know it itself, so I can’t say offhand if the fugues were played in a set order or simply chosen from a larger group. Either way, the sequence was satisfying, with the slowest and gravest of the fugues coming in fourth place, followed by something suitably finishing.
This was followed by one of Mozart’s best-known quartets, the Dissonant, in C, K 465. There is nothing at all dissonant about the music, once Mozart has had his fun in an edgy prologue that must have alarmed a few conservative listeners (Mozart was by now new-ish in town). Happily, I long ago recovered from the snobbish feeling that the Dissonant is too familiar to attend to (although I do still vastly prefer K 464, in A, but just as a matter of love). I have known every note since undergraduate days, when there was nothing remarkable about such a statement. Unfortunately, there was nothing remarkable about the Emerson’s performance. It was very good, and the audience loved it, but I wanted something more — edgy. Not more dissonant, saints preserve us. (There were at least two egregious out-of-tune notes as it was.) But more interesting dynamically. (Meaning: more sharply articulated variations of loud and soft, fast and slow, fluid and staccato, and all the other opposites that make Mozart so bottomlessly interesting.) The Emerson, frankly, looked old. They played a quartet that they have had down for too long.
After the interval, clarinetist David Shifrin brought the group to a more exciting prospect, for Mozart’s very great Clarinet Quintet in A, K 581 — as, perhaps, did a switch between the violinists; much as I hate to think so, the Dissonant may have sagged for me because second violinist Philip Setzer was given an ill-advised chance to play first. Certainly Eugene Drucker, the quartet’s usual primo, played with a melting beauty during the retarded section that precedes the zippy conclusion of the Quintet’s finale. As for Mr Shifrin, he reminded me from the get-go that the Quintet was a work that Benny Goodman learned to play in his Hull House youth and recorded in his jazz prime. Mr Shifrin’s execution perhaps a trifle too impeccable to bring the Battle of the Bands to mind, but he certainly winked and sparkled. As always, I was furious with Mozart for not repeating the sublime conclusion to the Larghetto’s exposition. I always look forward to hearing this music again at the end, and I am always madly disappointed.
Especially when I’m already fretful.