Four, And More

In the second of its three performances on Stanford Lively Arts' 2008-2009 season, the St. Lawrence String Quartet practically tore the house down with the final number of its program. For Sunday's Dinkelspiel recital, the quartet invited back two of its former members. The quartet on its own set itself a tough assignment in the middle of the program, but it was the Dvořák Sextet at concert's end that raised the roof.

This is a group of near-perfect instrumental performers who are energetic, enjoy their work, and dig in to their parts with an eye-opening ferocity. There are the violinists Geoff Nuttall and Scott St. John (the two democratically alternating their roles as first and second fiddlers); violist Lesley Robertson, who sat there modestly, almost unmoving, while playing with enormous sophistication; and Christopher Costanza, a spectacular instrumentalist who hovered over his cello like Nosferatu and addressed the music with palpable affection. To this splendid group were added two additional performers, both members of the original quartet when it was formed 20 years ago: Barry Shiffman (formerly second violinist, but playing viola here) and Marina Hoover (cello). It would have been difficult to find better guest players. The program opened with the prelude to Capriccio (1941), Richard Strauss' 15th and final opera. In Capriccio, Strauss tried to recapture the essence and spirit of his early success Der Rosenkavalier, setting the work in the prerevolutionary Paris of 1775 and basing his story on the plot of Salieri’s opera Prima la musica e poi le parole. (The Salieri at its premiere was performed at one end of Austrian Emperor Joseph II’s gigantic orangery by an Italian troupe, while Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor was simultaneously staged at the other end.) Capriccio's central argument is an old question about the hierarchy of importance in opera: "What takes precedence, the words or the music?" During the opera's play-within-a-play, the music of this string sextet returns. It is elegant music, with something of the atmosphere of Der Rosenkavalier, and it was lovingly played on Sunday.

The Emperor's New Notes?

Shiffman and Hoover then left the stage, leaving the current St. Lawrence players to perform Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. It is a difficult work to play, and one perhaps even more difficult to listen to. It doesn’t matter how many times I am told how beautiful and sensitive this composition is; I have only a limited tolerance for atonality, and its six movements seem endless. On top of this, George Perle — an authority on Berg, and one of his (and this work’s) greatest advocates — died this week at the age of 93. The news came just in time to make me feel even more ashamed of not loving the music. The Lyric Suite owes its existence to the 10 years' surreptitious love affair between Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, wife of a Prague industrialist. At the heart of the work is the theme "A, B-flat, B-natural, F," which in German musical notation are the initials of the two lovers' names, "A.B." and "H.F." Berg wrote to Hanna, "I have secretly inserted our initials into the music," and gave her a score of the work, specially notated in multicolored inks, saying, "May it be a monument to our great love." In preparation for this concert, I went to the Stanford music library and studied the score of the Lyric Suite. Then I listened to two different recordings of the work several times. Finally, I reread just about everything I could find about the piece. I just don’t get it. Worse — much worse — I feel guilty about not getting it, because people keep telling me how incredibly beautiful this music is. The situation reminds me of my childhood experiences with my mother’s awful split pea soup — which she insisted was delicious, and which I hated. Within the architecture of the quartet, Berg assigns to Hanna the number 10, while giving the number 23 to himself. And having done so, he structures the movements to conform to the cryptographic and numerological interpretations of these two numbers. (One movement, for example, has 460 measures, the number being a multiple of both 10 and 23.) This is not mathematics but numerology, a mystical relationship between numbers and living things that is presumed to hold significance but lies in the world of the occult. If Lucy with her 5-cent psychiatric advice were here to help, perhaps she could get my head shaped right. In her absence, though ... melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, tonally, emotionally, structurally, and musically, I just don’t get it.

Paradise Regained

But the recital's final work, for which the two additional players rejoined the group, was the perfect antidote. It was the magnificent Sextet in A, op. 48, of Antonin Dvořák, a work that so won the hearts of the audience by its luxurious cascade of Czech and Hungarian melodies, its lavish gypsy harmonies in sixths, that when the group finished, the listeners leapt to to their feet to roar their appreciation and delight — for both the work and its scandalously delicious performance. The last movement, a set of variations, was so clever and well composed that I wanted it to go on forever. No such luck, but at least there is more Dvořák (the G-Major Quartet, Op. 106) on April 5, the St. Lawrence's final Lively Arts appearance of the season.