Small is Beautiful
SIMON, JOHN
On Music SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL By John Simon We have all heard about the declining market for classical music, both live and recorded, but chamber music seems to strike people as the most...
...Marked allegro con moto, it displays briskness and effervescence, and concludes on an almost heroic note...
...the four musicians get dwarfed by a vast stage...
...There are three fully digital CD versions of the work...
...Well, there is the star system...
...The only reason the Three Idylls (1906) of FrankBridge (1879-1941) is not a string quartet is that Bridge was too self-depreciating to label them as such...
...The first movement paradoxically wants to be both allegro (rather fast and lively) and tranquillo...
...Absent a while, the wistfulness creeps back, a little less heartbreaking, as a controlled sadness...
...I could easily name any number that are as good...
...the Hollywood Quartet, which could more aptly have been called the Mitteleuropa, now making a posthumous comeback on CD...
...The marking here is allegretto poco lento, con tenerezza (with tenderness), well conveyed by the Brindisi's lightly floating sound...
...Throughout, the sound is crisp, and the playing sensitive and compelling...
...With the latter forms, chamber music extends a bridge toward the orchestral, and you will experience the seamless transition from a piece for clarinet and piano to one that calls itself rightly a concerto, despite a mere handful of players...
...The last movement is scherzando (playful, jocular), but also con moto, with spirited motion...
...As Harry Halbreich has commented, "The harp blends so charmingly with the string instruments that we cannot but wonder that no one before thought of this combination...
...Although the string section is the heart of the orchestra and usually carries the tune, a mere handful of strings makes people leery...
...I visualize a person walking through a city (even though Ibert composed the piece in the Haute-Savoie) at a good tempo yet lost in thought, with a faint melancholy impinging occasionally...
...It has an almost wraith like translucence, and reaches a kind of apotheosis in Britten's tribute, especially its third, seventh and last movements...
...Escales (Ports of Call), Divertissement and the Saxophone Concertino are the popular favorites...
...Let me further recommend two chamber music CDs by another British composer, Sir ArnoldBax (1883-1953): Chandos 9602 and Hyperion 66807...
...I believe, nevertheless, that a taste for chamber music can be instilled and developed, provided one goes about it the right way...
...A memory of the more affecting melodies surfaces briefly, soon superseded by the toccata (rapid movement) opening, to whose return the harp adds arpeggios and glissandos that wipe away all melancholy...
...Chamber music speaks the same language as orchestral music, only less loudly...
...The piece, which lasts somewhere between 14 and 15.5 minutes, is in three movements: allegro tranquillo, andante sostenuto, and scherzando con moto...
...Repeated in the violin's higher register, the ache feels sublimated, spiritualized...
...If a well-known string quartet performs in a large hall, the musicmaking has a way of getting lost in all that space...
...As the musicologist Claude Rostand rightly noted, "His extreme modesty did not allow him to assume the place to which he was entitled by his work, and especially his string quartets, whose writing displays remarkable craft...
...there are no dramatic effects from the brass or percussion...
...Then there is the setting...
...Ibert (1890-1962) was proficient in all genres, and, though not quite of the top rank, his works rarely disappoint...
...The sound produced is not big enough for the uninformed listener...
...Acquire the CDs discussed here, listen to each several times, and I wager you'll join the ranks of those who keep chamber music alive...
...Then coolness resumes...
...In olden days, when music-making was the prime family entertainment, you could count on the family and maybe a few neighbors getting together to play anything up to a sextet, most often merrily sight-reading...
...To fill out the disk, there is Britten's Second String Quartet, a chance to appraise the uses to which Britten put Bridge's teaching, as well as the lovely but little-known First String Quartet by Imogen Hoist, worthy of her much more famous father, Gustav...
...Convincingly, Anne Schuchman finds "volubility with a touch of aggressivity" in this movement...
...The last few notes belong to the harp, whose diminuendo dissolves the emotion...
...The third idyll is more resolute and energetic...
...The recapitulation, starting high in the violin and viola, works its way down into the cello's lower register, creating the withdrawn, shadowed quality...
...Does a late Beethoven quartet make merely small gestures...
...here the appropriate modifiers would be "thoughtful" and "crisp...
...That string tone is so rich and various as to elicit countless compositions for string orchestra cuts no ice with the broad public...
...Nowadays few families can boast a single accomplished instrumentalist...
...The second idyll forms the basis for the Variations on a Theme by FrankBridge (1937), one of the most important earlyworks of his student Benjamin Britten, a lifelong champion of his teacher's music...
...at an orchestral concert, for the world-famous conductor...
...It is in the most positive key of C maj or and plunges boldly ahead, complete with plucky pizzicatos, as if to banish excess sentiment...
...Composed in his early Romantic phase (he approached atonality in later life), the Idylls have an unostentatious charm in both their simplicity and the variety they encompass with terseness...
...central section], and then recalls the opening in a beautifully withdrawn, shadowed release rather than a mere recapitulation...
...Finally, there is the matter of the repertory...
...Chamber music is said to reflect the composer's intimate feelings, whereas symphonic music supposedly represents his more accessible and involving public statements...
...The first piece, aptly described by Michael Oliver, "builds powerful emotion in the short space before its appealingly graceful trio [i.e...
...at a song recital, for the highly-touted singer...
...REM 311146, with the Jean-Louis Petit Chamber Orchestra, features an hour's worth of Ibert...
...In the trio we get a change of key and a faster tempo, but with much rubato (freedom...
...The marking is adagio molto espressivo...
...Moreover, such musicianing can hardly compete with the keener joys of television and movie rentals...
...Hence musical-comedy arrangements slight string players, a small minority in pit orchestras...
...On Olympia 469 (the second volume of a fine complete Ibert chamber music) there are 79 minutes of Ibert by solid Dutch instrumentalists...
...Did Mahler, who aside from songs composed very little for small aggregations, lack personal feeling...
...Notice that I did not pick a traditional trio for violin, viola and cello, but one with a somewhat piquant departure...
...the Quartetto Italiano...
...And, surely, music performed for a mere 150 souls cannot be very important, can it...
...Here the cello introduces a yearning, achingly beautiful melody that the string instruments build into an impassioned crescendo as the harp trots along, reminding us that life's steady rhythm continues...
...You can't lose with either disk...
...Their duration in the performance by the Brindisi Quartet on Conifer 196 is 7:02, 2:24, 3:29 minutes, respectively, and Bridge clearly considered them bagatelles...
...There is also the sheer spectacle of, say, a hundred-piece orchestra, using everything from bows to mallets, belaboring, seated or standing, a large number of instruments from tiny to huge, and still keeping together—a sort of stationary ballet with the arms doing all the dancing...
...At a recital, a good many concertgoers come for the celebrated virtuoso...
...Let me begin my demonstration with Jacques Ibert's Trio for Violin, Cello and Harp (1944...
...In 1906 Bridge did not yet exhibit the tragic quality that informs much of the later work...
...In this case, too, a ternary form features a somewhat more volatile middle section, and the piece ends with a chord that suggests a farewell to reminiscence...
...Even the most withdrawn composer needs an audience...
...The theme is a wispy little waltz motif, like something summoned up from long ago...
...even the most declamatory or celebratory compositions, if they are worth anything, express some sort of private feelings...
...Starting out as a violinist, Bridge became a distinguished viola player with both the Joachim and English quartets, and thus familiar with the quartet literature...
...On these splendidly played and recorded CDs you will not only hear ravishing music, you will also encounter a wide range of chamber pieces for diverse forces, from a clarinet sonata, through the sublime Elegiac Trio, to quintets, septets, octets, and even a nonet, for various instruments...
...This is evident near the middle, where the solo harp introduces a lilting, poignant theme briefly taken up and developed by the strings...
...But a well articulated stage whisper carries as far, conveys as much, as a shout...
...Of the three other versions of the Three Idylls on CD, I can recommend only the Coull Quartet's on Hyperion, where the couplings are Elgar and Walton's string quartets...
...Ibert has said that music should be "the expression of an inner adventure," and I can imagine a scenario to go with the music...
...But music is not literature or painting, where there are diaries and sketchbooks...
...If the performance is in a smaller, more intimate hall, the public may not know about the venue, or wish to bother seeking it out...
...Any version will do, but I marginally prefer the fullbodied ADDA sound...
...History has not been propitious to chamber music either...
...The Idylls derive their name not so much from a bucolic quality as from the literal meaning of the Greek eidullion: little form, or miniature...
...If you don't own this Britten masterpiece, you are missing a great deal...
...And what a jewel it turned out to be, well worth its weight in cigarettes...
...Ibert's daughter, Jacqueline, was an accomplished harpist and struck a bargain with her father: She would give him her cigarette ration, a precious thing in wartime, if he wrote a composition especially for her...
...Today, though, attending an evening of string quartets is like watching a four-character play without a star: Idolatry does not thrive when quartered, especially when you don't know exactly whom to root for...
...Happy hunting...
...ADDA 5 81060 offers the Ensemble Arpeggione playing this and another Ibert piece, plus good short items by Milhaud and Roussel...
...Another problem is that so much chamber music is being written for string quartet or trio...
...The second movement, andante sostenuto, suggests a moderate, walking pace, smoothly sustained...
...To be sure, not so long ago some chamber aggregations did have star status: the Budapest Quartet, which became progressively less Hungarian...
...In a recent article, the Times' chief music critic confessed his unawareness of a Fauré quintet...
...Still, if you hang around record stores, you will keep hearing people asking for a Beethoven symphony or a Rachmaninoff concerto rather than a Schubert quartet or Fauré quintet...
...the Beaux Arts Trio, and a few others...
...On Music SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL By John Simon We have all heard about the declining market for classical music, both live and recorded, but chamber music seems to strike people as the most recondite form...
Vol. 81 • October 1998 • No. 11
