MANHATTAN CHAMBER PLAYERS
with DAVID FUNG, piano | Chamber Music

Igor Stravinsky wrote his very first essay in the chamber music genre, the Three Pieces for String Quartet, in Salvan, Switzerland, in the spring and summer of 1914—just one year after the tumultuous premiere of his history-making ballet, The Rite of Spring. As the clouds of war gathered over Europe, Stravinsky had moved his family to the Swiss Alps, in the hopes that the mountain climate would provide relief to his wife, who suffered from tuberculosis, and conveniently stayed in The Land of Neutrality for the rest of the Great War. In an era that also produced one of his chamber-music masterpieces, The Soldier’s Tale, Stravinsky used the newly-imposed austerity of the War years to stylistically turn his back on the lush, yet brutalistic grandeur of his three sprawling ballet scores for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, and write, with equal mastery, in a new and sober style: spare, jazz- and ragtime-influenced, and ultimately neoclassical in scope.

In a boldly anti-Romantic step, the Three Pieces originally did not have titles, merely metronome markings; Stravinsky only added the titles fifteen years later, when he orchestrated the pieces and then added a fourth, creating the somewhat less successful Four Etudes for Orchestra, whereupon the dedication of the whole affair went to the great and adventurous Swiss conductor, Ernest Ansermet.

As the Stravinsky scholar Eric Walter White opined, the Three Pieces are “really contrasting studies, in popular, fantastic, and liturgical moods”. And as Melvin Berger wrote later:
“The first and shortest piece, ‘Danse’, has a chantlike melody consisting of just four notes that the first violin plays over and over again in varied rhythmic patterns. It represents a primitive folk dance style that was to become important in Stravinsky’s later, so-called Russian pieces….’Eccentrique’ comes next. Stravinsky explained that it was inspired ‘by the eccentric movements of the great clown, “Little Tick”’, whom he had seen at a circus in London….Much more serious is the third piece, ‘Cantique’ (‘Canticle’), which Stravinsky described as ‘choral and religious in character.’ Slowly and solemnly he intones a five-measure chant that uses only three notes…and which is interrupted by two-measure, faster-moving responses, until the music fades away with the viola’s final notes.” The venerable Flonzaley Quartet would give the premiere of the Three Pieces in Paris in May of 1915, and gave the American premiere, in Chicago, later that year.”

Aside from his beloved First Quartet, with its poignant Andante cantabile which quotes a Ukrainian folksong, Tchaikovsky’s string quartets have never seemed quite at home with American audiences. Most music-lovers over here don’t realize that actually all three Quartets date from the composer’s early years in Moscow, before his brief and disastrous marriage to one of his students, forcing the young Tchaikovsky to privately reckon with his homosexuality. This is almost strange, as both the Second and Third Quartets betray a wisdom and world-weariness that would make one think that they were hallmarks of his later, more fatalistic style. Indeed, Tchaikovsky, notorious for his fits of self-doubt, always considered the Second Quartet, written quickly over the Christmas break of early 1874 and premiered that March, to be one of his very finest compositions; as he wrote to his brother, Modest, “none has flowed out of me more simply or easily.” Unlike his later works, with their pronounced tilt toward Central European models, the Quartet would also find favor with the Russian-nationalist composers, known as “The Mighty Five”, such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui—and it’s not hard to see why. As John Henken wrote in his notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic:

“Tchaikovsky at this time—as throughout his career—generally accepted Classical forms with enthusiasm, but the four standard movements of a Classical string quartet find quite original fulfillment here. Mozart was Tchaikovsky’s idol, but Beethoven seems to be the inspiration in this work. It opens with a dissonant crunch, launching a chromatic introduction that is part fugato, part recitative for the first violin. Even when the main Moderato assai body arrives, it comes without the tonic and is rhythmically restless and off-beat. There is a wildness to this music that disrupts its Classical boundaries. The Scherzo is also awry, but then scherzos are historically a place for metrical games. The contrast with the gently dancing middle Trio section is sharp—literally, as the key goes from D-flat (five flats) to A (three sharps). Tchaikovsky does something similar with his intense slow movement, another A-B-A form, again with unsettled harmonies and rhythms. The Finale is structurally relatively pristine but manifested with exuberant, almost orchestral drive.

“Modest Tchaikovsky linked the Christmastide composition of this work to svyatki, the Russian 12 days of Christmas tradition that mixes costumed trick-or-treating with tipsy wassailing and carol singing. Tchaikovsky scholar Roland John Wiley suggests that the unstable characteristics and extravagant gestures of the String Quartet No. 2 may be metaphors for this riotous celebration. ‘If there is something of Russian Christmas about this music, it would help explain why the Second [Quartet] was so well received in Russia and so disregarded elsewhere, and why Tchaikovsky himself esteemed it so.’ ”

But is perhaps the fourth movement—which, in its restrained and febrile neoclassicism, can almost seem like a throwaway ending after the noble tragedy of the third—that has done the most to leave audiences strangely unsatisfied, perhaps expecting one of Tchaikovsky’s noble fits of neurasthenia (as best symbolized in the finales of his symphonies) rather than the art-for-art’s-sake world of Mozart and Mendelssohn, which he so adored. Most of all, the quartet almost seems like a symphony for strings in disguise—an idea which would blossom with his monumental Serenade for Stings, of many years later.

Composed between 1919 and 1921, the solo piano version of Maurice Ravel’s La Valse is perhaps the most telling example of how the music of this most fastidious of French composers (along with Paul Dukas), which always seems so effervescent to the listener, often required a prolonged gestation. The idea for a symphonic poem that would be an homage to the waltzes of the Johann Strauss family came to ravel as early as 1906; but it would be his shattering experience as an ambulance driver in the First World War (he was too short and sickly to serve on the line) that would, tragically, clinch his inspiration. The very first performance of the work actually came in November 1920, when Ravel and the Italian composer Alfredo Casella would perform the version for two pianos in, of all places, Vienna, for Arnold Schoenberg’s famous but short-lived “Society for Private Musical Performances”; the premiere of the most-familiar orchestral version would come a month later, in Paris. What had begun in Ravel’s mind as a musical version of Sacher-torte had, by 1920, come to be a memorial to all that was beautiful about Austria, now senselessly and heartlessly destroyed. As one critic wrote, “whether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-movement design plots the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the waltz.” Ravel himself was, as ever, cagey about the work’s descriptions, only offering a hint of a scenario: “Swirling clouds afford glimpses, through rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds scatter little by little; one can distinguish an immense hall with a whirling crowd. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855.” But it would be earlier, in 1914, that Ravel had confided that La Valse really was “a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, mingled with, in my mind, the impression of a fantastic, fatal whirling.”

Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet marked the beginning of a genre—the piano quintet, that heady mix of “chamber” and “symphonic” styles, at times seeming almost like a piano concerto in miniature—which was to both flourish and fade with the nineteenth century, and the Romantic era. The template for the masterpieces that would follow—Brahms, Elgar, Schoenberg (via Webern), Dvorak, Franz Schmidt, Erich Korngold and Cesar Franck—it combines that era’s bravura tradition of the piano concerto, within a chamber-music setting; perhaps this is why the spirit of the genre seemed to fade after the final ember of the titanic 1940 Quintet of Shostakovich, written in the early days of that war that would wipe away whatever elegant and beautiful had remained of the old order (in this light, it does not seem surprising that the piano quintet form was taken up by neither Stravinsky, nor Britten, nor Debussy or Ravel, with Bartok and Sibelius confining themselves to student exercises). But just as most symphony orchestras all over the world continue to end their concert programs with “blockbusters” from the 19th century, so have piano quintets—and there are still others, that have yet to kick off their tombstones—remained justly popular with audiences through the years.

Prone to episodes of manic, bi-polar depression, even in the blissful early years of his career, Schumann wrote the Piano Quintet, in the “heroic” key of E-flat, in all of three weeks: part of the “Chamber Music Year” that was to be his 1842, just as 1841 had been his “Symphony Year” (producing not just the immortal “Spring” Symphony, but the arresting original version of the Symphony No.4, which Brahms so admired) and 1840, his “Year of Song”. Ultimately the Quintet’s breathless spontaneity must be ascribed to the joyous early years of marriage to his young wife, Clara Schumann—one of the great pianists of the 19th century, and later, the confidant of Brahms —who planned on leading the work’s premiere, on December 6th 1842. But Clara would fall ill on the day of the performance, and it fell to their dear friend, Felix Mendelssohn, who happened to also be in attendance, to sight-read the piano part. His dazzling performance, the stuff of history, added another lovely layer of complexity to the Quintet’s composition: Mendelssohn—then, not unlike Clara, in the early, uncomplicated years of their relationship—confided in Schumann that he found the second trio of the Scherzo movement to be not up to the level of the rest of the work, whereupon Schumann wrote a more exciting replacement! As for the dazzling music itself, Melvin Berger noted that:

“The bold, assertive first theme, played in a forceful tutti, opens the Quintet, followed immediately by its miraculous transformation into a wonderfully warm, cantilena melody. The cello and viola present the sensitive second theme as a conversational dialogue…The second movement, “In the Style of a March”, clearly refers to a funeral march…Schumann structures the first movement as a cross between rondo and sonata form. The Scherzo is the glorification of the musical scale. Whether a single instrument or in combination, going up or down, loud or soft…the subject is always scales. The lyrical, legato first trio with the first violin and viola in canon, offers a welcome respite…The return of the Scherzo is followed by the second trio, a high-powered, heavily accented perpetual motion…The crowning last movement contains all the virility and sturdiness of the first movement. The pianist flings out the muscular principal theme with an accent on every note…A contrasting quiet and songlike subsidiary melody acts as a foil…In the very spacious and remarkable coda, Schumann introduces two major fugal sections, the first based on the movement’s principal theme, the second combining that melody with that of the first movement…”

It is that glorious thematic transformation of Robert Schumann, combining the principal idea of the Quintet’s first movement with that of the finale, which serves as a final, blazing gesture of this transformational work itself—one founding a new tradition in classical music with this unique genre, one both intimate and magisterial, virtuosic yet sublime.

The Schumann Piano Quintet was a favorite work of the pianist, editor, and entrepreneur Willetta Warberg, indefatigable member of the Board of Directors of the Maverick Concerts, who passed away late last year and to whose memory this concert is dedicated. An extraordinary woman who wore many proverbial hats over the course of her life—prodigy pianist, spouse of the noted Israeli pianist David Bar-Ilan, senior food editor at magazines such as Look, Gourmet, and the Ladies Home Journal, and successful food author and business executive, Willetta moved to Saugerties in 1991 and soon became passionately involved at the Maverick and in the Woodstock musical scene in general—throwing herself into volunteering not just for our Board but for the Friends of Maverick, and as a noted duo-partner with another Maverick legend, the great composer and pianist Robert Starer. Willetta and I became good friends soon after I was appointed Music Director in 2002, and her selfless devotion to the Maverick, as well as her astute judgement as to the complicated world of artists and repertoire—she knew all too well the realities of the classical-music world, in good ways and bad—is something I shall truly miss. But most of all, we will all miss her beautiful intelligence and spirit, which touched every one of her endeavors, and her unvarying belief in the calling of Music to be a positive force in our lives.
– Alexander Platt