Beethoven & His Late Quartets: Part 1

Q&A with the Doric Quartet

Last night, at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, the Doric Quartet gave us a preview of tonight's concert with excerpts from each work on the program, ending with the conclusion of  Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op.131. The program also includes quartets by Robert Schumann and Ernest Chausson – and will open with excerpts from Britten's Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello played by Julia Rosenbaum whom some of you may have heard play with the Harrisburg Symphony last weekend (she’s the 16-year-old winner of the latest “Rising Star” Concerto Competition held at Messiah College).

You can read more about the concert here in this earlier post (which includes directions to Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front Street in Harrisburg). The concert begins at 8:00.

This post is about Beethoven’s Late Quartets, more or less in general. Part 2 of this post, Beethoven, the Late Quartets & His Audience, continues at my other blog which will also give you more background on these works, often described as the Himalayas of the String Quartet Repertoire.

It’s difficult to find the best performances or recordings on YouTube, even when there are so many good ones available. I’ve chosen this clip for two reasons: it’s complete in one “video” and it’s the Juilliard Quartet, recorded in 1960. However, the sound, transferred from vinyl, is not the best. But it is the Juilliard Quartet.

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The work is ostensibly in seven movements, though a few of them are little more than expanded introductions. The main difference between these movements and those in other works Beethoven composed, they’re played without interruption. It’s also interesting to realize how the composer balances the difficult movements (the opening fugue, for example) with a contrasting movement (at 6:47), a scherzo built on simpler phrase structures and dancelike rhythms that are more easily assimilated.

While the rhythmic design might give the whole work a more seamless flow, the frequent changes in tempo and mood might give it more discontinuity – rather than being closely organized around the tonal center of C-sharp Minor, there are six distinct “main” keys and thirty-one changes of tempo (ten more than in the longer Op.132 Quartet).

At 9:40, a brief recitative-like dialogue sets up the heart of the quartet, a long, largely slow set of variations (beginning at 10:34) with its own sense of unity and contrast.

This easier-to-follow movement is followed by a wild scherzo (at 25:56) ending with the glassy sound of the strings being played near the bridge, before rising up to a dramatic conclusion (31:03) that sets up a slow, tragic passage that leads us into the dramatic and intensely rhythmic finale (at 33:22).

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Beethoven in 1823

It’s possible these five late string quartets of Beethoven’s might never have been composed.

In 1822, Beethoven had been sketching at a new quartet while he was working on the Missa Solemnis and had offered both works (the nearly completed Mass and the as yet unfinished if unbegun quartet) to one of his publishers, C.F. Peters, who accepted the Mass but turned down the quartet, saying they were more interested in, say, piano trios or piano quartets. Besides, they had enough “beautiful quartets” by Ludwig Spohr, Bernhard Romberg and Pierre Rodé (how many of you have heard any quartets by either of these composer recently? Anyone? Bueller?)

So Beethoven put the quartet aside and resumed work on the Mass (he had finished the first draft).

Then, in late November, 1822, a Russian prince from St. Petersburg who had lived in Vienna and was quite familiar with Beethoven’s music, sent him a letter hoping to commission from him one, two or three string quartets. Beethoven immediately sent off a letter to a student of his then in London to look around and see if there was the possibility of “selling quartets” there which, it turned out, was answered in the affirmative. He also pursued other arrangements with another publisher, meaning he could write something for Prince Galitsin who would pay for its being composed, and then make additional money from publishers in England, Germany and Vienna.

They argued about fees, the publishers feeling Beethoven’s asking price too steep, though the Prince was willing to pay whatever Beethoven wanted. The only problem was, in early 1823, Beethoven had other projects still in the fire that needed to be completed first: the Mass, the 9th Symphony, the Diabelli Variations – all vast works – and that only after the May 1824 concert which saw the symphony’s premiere would he be able to turn his attention to the new quartets.

This request from Galitsin almost didn’t come about.

Having heard Carl Maria von Weber’s new opera, Der Freischütz, he thought perhaps he would contact Weber for his newest commissioning project. Galitsin was then 27 years old, a talented amateur cellist married to a talented amateur pianist. He employed his own string quartet (of which he was the cellist). But when he announced he thought about commissioning Weber, the violist in his quartet, himself a composer, advised against it and said he should contact Beethoven instead.

Now, Beethoven may have already had a quartet on a back burner – he always had new works on numerous back burners but didn’t always complete them (an opera based on Macbeth at least provided some ideas for his “Ghost” Trio, for instance). Without a possible performance outlet, would Beethoven have spent the time and effort on a quartet for the sake of writing another quartet? And would he have written, as it turned out, five of them?

He picked up his discarded quartet sketches again before he completed the 9th Symphony, put them away again. He had initially proposed completing the first quartet by March of 1823 but then put Galitsin off with more delays and excuses that the prince probably feared he would never see his quartets.

Then, in May of 1825, after the premiere of the 9th, Beethoven settled down to work on the quartets. Originally there were going to be three for Galitsin. But he kept on writing them, perhaps keeping an eye to the other publishers and the lucrative deal he had made with them for those three. At one point, while working on the third of these quartets, he wrote to a publisher in Berlin that, ultimately, he planned on writing a total of six quartets – imagine, another Late Beethoven Quartet!

Beethoven’s friend, the violinist Karl Holz (recently, the new 2nd Violinist of Ignaz Schuppanzig’s quartet) had joked there was enough music in the Op.130 Quartet for two works – and then the decision to separate the difficult finale known as the Grosse Fuge resulted in at least an additional fee.

By February of 1825, over two years since Galitsin first wrote to him, Beethoven completed the first of these quartets, the E-flat Major, Op.127. Then in July, he had completed the A Minor which would be published as Op.132. Come November, the B-flat Major, Op.130, was finished.

But he just kept going.

In May of 1826, Beethoven informed his publisher Schott that a new quartet was ready – this was the C-sharp Minor, op.131 – though he didn’t send them the manuscript until mid-August. It was announced by the publisher in February of 1827 but didn’t go into print until June. By that time, Beethoven had died.

Immediately after sending off Op.131, then, Beethoven started work on the F Major, Op.135, which he finished in October.

Sometime during this span of months, there’s a fragment of a sketch for a Quartet in C Major, what might have become the sixth quartet from this set.

Between October and November, then, while visiting his brother in Gneixendorf, along with his nephew in what turned out to be a most unfortunate visit, Beethoven composed the new finale for the Op.130 quartet, replacing its original Grosse Fuge ending.

This would turn out to be Beethoven’s last completed composition. He and his nephew returned to Vienna. Beethoven’s health took a decided turn for the worse and he died on March 26th, 1827.

In April, 1825, while composing the A Minor Quartet, Op.132, Beethoven had suffered another relapse, this time with intestinal complications and spitting blood. A letter to his doctor ended “Doctor, close the door to Death! Music will also help in my hour of need.” In late May, he began to feel better: he composed the famous slow movement of the quartet, the Heiliger Dankgesang with its prayer of Thanksgiving to God on his convalescence with a sense of renewed strength in the contrasting sections.

A few days later, his nephew wrote to him “God is my witness that my sole dream is to get away completely from you.” Karl was 18 at the time.

There followed a precarious truce. But it was a time filled with tension and several letters back and forth between Beethoven and Karl’s teacher who was not supposed to allow Karl out of the house at night under any circumstances.

Then, on July 31st, 1826, Karl attempted to commit suicide, shooting himself in the head with a pistol but succeeding only in wounding himself (apparently, a week later, they had not yet removed the bullet). Among other things, this caused the need to cover it up since attempting suicide was a state crime. Something had to be done to get Karl out of this state of mind – perhaps a military career would give him the necessary discipline and, also, get him out from under the obsessive watch of his Uncle Ludwig.

Beethoven was still working on the final version of Op.131 in July of 1826, only sending the score off a couple of weeks after his nephew’s attempted suicide. Originally, the score was to be dedicated to Johann Nepomuk Wolfmayer, a devoted friend of Beethoven’s, but instead he gave the dedication to General Baron von Stutterheim who had secured a place for Karl in his regiment: Karl joined the regiment in January of 1827 and never saw his uncle again. Wolfmayer, instead, received the dedication of the next quartet, Op.135. A wealthy textile merchant, Wolfmayer had advanced Beethoven a large sum for a Requiem that Beethoven promised he would write but never did. (Imagine the irony of both Mozart and Beethoven writing requiems at the times of their deaths?)

Alternating between depression and defiance, Karl’s life was not an easy one, kept in almost virtual imprisonment at his school and forbidden to see his mother. Whatever tensions led to Karl’s attempt to take his own life must not have been easy for the composer to bear, either.

For lack of space and time, we’ll have to leave the biographical details at that, but it’s enough of a headline to give you an idea Beethoven was not working on this quartet in an idyllic setting.

Click here for Part 2: Beethoven, the Late Quartets & His Audience.

Dick Strawser

The Guarneri Quartet: Getting Started

Hard to believe this weekend will be the last concert of the season for Market Square Concerts.

Harder to believe is it's the last opportunity for Harrisburg audiences to hear one of the legendary string quartets of our time. The Guarneri Quartet will be performing at 4pm Sunday afternoon at Market Square Church in what will be one of their last performances. The end of the 2008-2009 Season marks their retirement after 45 years of playing before the public.

My previous post looked at the "life cycle" of a string quartet. This one looks at how the Guarneri Quartet itself got started. There'll be another post soon about the music on the program: Haydn's "Rider" Quartet, Dohnanyi's 2nd Quartet (from their latest recording) and Ravel's Quartet.

Incidentally, you can read Guarneri violinist Arnold Steinhardt's blog, Fiddler's Beat, at his website (just follow the link at the bottom of the home-page).

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Some string quartets slowly come into existence, evolving out of a bunch of friends hanging out together who started playing through stuff and then decided to branch out beyond that weekend’s reading session or wedding gig.

Other quartets are brought into being by a higher power – usually a teacher or mentor – who points at them and says “You – form a quartet and play this program.”

Careers may begin with a big bang or, more likely, take years of hard work and promotion before they start receiving recognition, a long process during which more quartets will just give up trying.

Along the way, there might be some good reviews, a competition, acceptance by a high-powered agent, maybe even a lucky break with a big-name endorsement. Maybe a quartet or two got their big Carnegie Hall debut concerts by sitting around a mid-town Manhattan soda fountain the way Hollywood starlets got movie contracts in years gone by, but I wouldn’t suggest making it part of the plan.

In 1964, three violinists in their late-20s who’d all been students together at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute for Music – Arnold Steinhardt, John Dalley and Michael Tree – went to the Marlboro Music Festival. Like a roster of available participants, each musician played chamber music with different combinations of instruments and players.

Tree was interested in playing the viola and sometimes played violin, sometimes the viola, worried about the changes one needed to make physically, musically and temperamentally when switching between instruments on the same program. With his friends, he played quartets with a borrowed viola. Joined by cellist David Soyer, a few years their senior, they filled out the Mendelssohn Octet for the Budapest Quartet, one of the greatest quartets of all times, who was mentoring the festival along with the likes of pianist Rulolph Serkin and other famous musicians.

It was cellist Mischa Schneider (who’d been in the Budapest Quartet for 34 years then) who was first impressed by their interpretation. It seems these four young players came into the first rehearsal fully formed with their own interpretation, not like four players put together who would need to be taught and molded into the overall plan. It was 2nd Violinist Alexander Schneider (who even after his years in the quartet went on to mentor young string players until his death in 1998) who said they should form their own quartet.

So they did.

They took their name from the family of violin makers in Cremona, Italy, in the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Guarneri Family. By then, cellist David Soyer owned a cello made by Andrea Guarneri. But Michael Tree, who chose to play viola, didn’t even own a viola at the time and had to borrow instruments for the first few years.

(There’s a rumor going around that the three violinists had decided who would play viola by a coin-toss, which Tree says was absolutely not true: he was exploring playing the viola and was all too happy to become the group’s violist.)

In the next few seasons, with the endorsement by the Budapest Quartet, the newly-minted Guarneri Quartet – who also learned aspects of moderation and even temperament from their mentors which they also applied to the non-musical aspects of their relationship – performed at the Spoleto Festival, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and made some recordings for RCA.

Unlike most young quartets (both in terms of the quartet’s newness, their collective youth as well as their individual experience), the Guarneri had managed to soften the rough edges usually associated with newness. They sounded like an already mature ensemble.

The producer of their recordings urged pianist Artur Rubinstein, one of the greatest pianists of all time and then “pushing” 80, to listen to the Guarneri’s recording. He was more than impressed: he wanted to record with them.
So one day they got together and played through the Brahms Quintet, perhaps the most famous of all works for piano and string quartet. Rubinstein was almost 80, the quartet members ranged from 29 to 43. And yet it was a perfect match. They recorded it shortly afterward. At the end of that session, Rubinstein said he wanted to do the Schumann Quintet with them, too, so they read through that and recorded it the next day.

One could say “the rest is history.”
In addition to two recordings of the Complete Beethoven Quartets and the Mozart “Haydn” Quartets (both for RCA and for Philips), the complete Brahms String Quartets, String Quintets, plus the Piano Quartets and the Piano Quintet, the major Schubert Quartets and the String Quintet, plus the quartets of Schumann and Bartok along with the single quartets of Debussy and Ravel, there are recordings of the complete quartets of Arriaga (a Spanish composer who died before he was 20) and Leoš Janáček as well as quartets by Sibelius, Grieg and Verdi that are not often heard or recorded. You can find out more about some of their recordings available on-line here.

Their latest recording, released in February 2009 to coincide with their Farewell Tour, is SONY’s “Hungarian Album” which features three quartets including two by Ernő Dohnányi (his String Quartet No. 2 in D-flat Major, Op. 15 and String Quartet No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 33) plus Zoltán Kodály's String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10. The Kodaly is on the program this weekend with Market Square Concerts, along with Haydn’s “Rider” Quartet and Ravel’s Quartet.

Violinist Arnold Steinhardt, incidentally, has some recordings that are made available at his website’s quartet page: these are recordings you can download from some of their LPs which have never been transferred to CD before! You can sample them or purchase them. Enjoy!

- Dr. Dick
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Photo information: Top - Guarneri Quartet in 1965, the year after their founding (photo by Helen Wright).
2nd - The Guarneri Quartet in Munich in 1969 (photo by Irving Fisher)
3rd - recording with Artur Rubinstein from a 1971 recording session (photo by Dorothea von Haeften)
4th - the quartet in a cross-over pose (found at Arnold Steinhardt's website, presumably 1969 by Irving Fisher)

The Life Cycle of a String Quartet

One of the great quartets in the world of chamber music is drawing the curtain closed at the end of this season. The Guarneri Quartet has been playing for 45 years and the four members of the quartet decided that 2008-2009 will be their last season together. They’ll be performing one of their last concerts (ever) this Sunday afternoon at 4pm at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg. (This is my first post about the concert: there will be others, so check back.)

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The Life Cycle of the String Quartet

Locating them in their natural habitat may not be difficult, but there is no one field guide that I know of which will help you identify a string quartet just by listening to them, nor give you particulars of their range, identifying characteristics nor even any information about their life cycle.

First of all, how does a string quartet’s life begin?

Very often, friends will get together to play, perhaps as students, decide the chemistry works well, find themselves a name and, if they decide to pursue something beyond the local scene, an agent. Having a cool name helps, have good chemistry is essential – and the agent, a necessity.

Giving concerts puts them before the public and with any luck some influential critics. Winning a few competitions doesn’t hurt. In fact, today it too is almost a necessity.

Eventually, the quartet will be performing in better and bigger halls in larger and more important cities and, with any luck, drawing in some money to make worthwhile all the time spent practicing and rehearsing and performing, working the repertoire into shape for either the discerning public or the competition judges and dealing with internal issues ranging from interpretation to the conflicts that inevitably arise when four different people – possibly with four different personalities and temperaments – spend so much time together, like any other deeply committed relationship.

Lucky ones get to make recordings. Luckier ones get to keep theirs active in the catalogue (neither is so easy today).

The more famous a quartet becomes, the busier it gets, the more demands it creates on its own inner workings but also in the life-outside-the-ensemble of each component member. One quartet player described working with his colleagues as being “like a second marriage.” It is difficult to be on the road when the spouse is left home and the children are growing up. Fortunately today, while tours may be more numerous, they do not require the travel time they once took, chewing up great chunks of the calendar year. And now there are cell-phones and e-mail to help them stay connected with the roots at home.

There are probably no statistics kept anywhere that would indicate how many quartets are born to compare that to how many quartets, for instance, are performing in any one season. But the names of only a few of them will reach the Top Shelf.

How quartets die, metaphorically speaking, is easier to explain. Many simply disband at an early age, whether for lack of success if not failure, or because the chemistry sours, reality bites or individual career paths change as the members decide to pursue the less challenging world of the solo performer where there is only one person to argue with about phrasing, dynamics or repertoire.

If a quartet is a single musical organism made up of four individuals, what happens when one member leaves – for whatever reason – and has to be replaced?

For many groups it’s the equivalent of transplant surgery: the process is one thing, the period waiting for the newly transplanted member to take (or not be rejected) is another. Sometimes this works and other times it can lead to the nastiest blood-letting from which the patient would be lucky to survive.

Sometimes, quartets change their personal and reconstitute themselves as almost wholly new ensembles. Ralph Evans, the 1st Violinist of the Fine Arts Quartet which was founded in 1946, actually grew up listening to the recording made by the original Fine Arts Quartet. Now, there is a whole new generation of players carrying on the name.

The Juilliard Quartet has undergone similar re-configurations since it, too, was formed in 1946: its founding 1st violinist, Robert Mann, retired after 50 seasons with the ensemble. When they performed with Market Square Concerts during their 60th Anniversary season (and Market Square Concert’s 25th), Ronald Copes, the most recent “New Guy,” had already been with the group nine years. But now, Joel Smirnoff, the current 1st violinist, will be leaving at the end of this season to take on the role of president of the Cleveland Institute of Music (moving on to bigger and more extensive organizational issues), to be replaced by the Next New Guy, Nicholas Eanet, 36 years old and a former student of Robert Mann’s.

And so life goes on.

Each significant anniversary is approached with a justifiable celebration, perhaps new recordings or a series of re-issued recordings (at least in the days when that part of the business was still industrious) and a tour similar to a victory lap. There are inevitable comparisons to its own past and questions raised about its future: a quartet at this stage of its life never has the chance to just relax in the present.

Other quartets make it to a ripe old age which in the world of classical music, where the composers themselves are often 100 to 250 years old, is not so easy to define in merely mortal terms. Standard definitions according to Social Security or political term limitations need not apply. There is no determining formula to combine the quartet’s number of years spent before the public multiplied by the age of its individual members to come up with a Quartet Longevity Index.

So after so many years together, the question must be faced, eventually, “when is it time?”

If the members agree that it would be better to disband and retire at a certain point rather than reconfigure itself into a new generation, the passing of the quartet is filled with more than just nostalgia. This time, if the public is lucky, there will also be one more victory lap that becomes an emotional long farewell. You would think it would just be easier to put out a press release announcing its retirement but this would be read by its fans like an obituary of a dear friend, never getting the chance to hear them one last time, to say good-bye.

The Guarneri Quartet has decided this season will be its last. Was it a momentous decision made after much soul-searching?

Not exactly. As violist Michael Tree explained in an interview last autumn, about the decision they reached in June, 2007.

"It was last spring in New York, about five minutes before we were due on-stage. The thought was raised that we might consider ending our careers on what we hoped was a high note. And that was that. We all had similar feelings, and one of the things we've learned over the years is to keep discussion to a minimum."

After 45 years and with only one personnel change in its history, the Guarneri Quartet is in the process of taking that final tour. This Sunday is our chance to celebrate all those great years of music-making and say good-bye.

Need I add, “don’t miss it”?

You can now read how the Guarneri Quartet got its start.

- Dr. Dick

Wind Quintet vs String Quartet

Let’s face it, there are more string quartets in the world – at least, in the professional, touring concert world – than there are wind and brass quintets. This may also have something to do with orchestras having more strings players than wind players in them, but maybe not. A standard orchestra can have 40-50 string players but maybe only 8-12 woodwind players (they can add more for the occasional Mahler performance, but generally speaking).

Why wind players who played in bands haven’t created the same kind of awareness and level of playing orchestras have has always been a mystery to me. And yet every high school and middle school will probably have a band – maybe a marching band for football season and a concert band or two the rest of the year. In addition, colleges may also have an elite band usually called a “wind ensemble.”

The point is, there are lots of string players who end up playing in orchestras and forming string quartets. Look at any brochure for a chamber music concert presenter around the country and there will be plenty of pianists, violinists and string quartets.

Not so many wind quintets.

So where do all those wind players go after they’ve played in bands and formed student wind quintets in college? If they haven’t joined an orchestra or are out there teaching somewhere, that means they’re probably making money (“Question: what’s the difference between a free-lance musician and a pizza? Answer: A pizza can feed a family of four”).

Part of the problem is repertoire. It’s a self-feeding conundrum, perhaps, that Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven wrote, like, 107 string quartets between them, but nothing originally for a woodwind quintet. When your standard works are by, say, Franz Danzi and Anton Reicha, contemporaries of Haydn and Beethoven, whose music is unknown to modern concert-goers used to standard symphonic and the usual chamber music fare, it’s an up-hill battle.

So it basically boils down to, let’s say, apples in one corner and oranges in another.

Part of the issue is the “unity of sound” you get out of a string quartet, where the sonorities of the two violins, the viola and the cello match each other because they’re members of the same instrumental family. It is easier to create and blend the layers music needed in the late-18th Century – melody, bass-line and the inner parts filling in the harmonies - with instruments who have matching sounds.

Life is different in a wind quintet (or woodwind quintet, though nobody refers to a brass quintet as a brasswind quintet except in Germany). Here you have five different instruments, each one a member of its own family. The clarinet is a single-reed instrument with a mellow tone. The oboe and bassoon are both played with double-reeds and have a more “reedy” tone but are very different from each other in sound. The flute (which at one time in its history was made of wood) has no reed, the sound created entirely by the player’s breath and lips. I’m not even sure how the horn (commonly called the French horn though it’s not really French but German) got into the group since it was never made of wood. But that’s not the point.

For one thing, a “wind section” in Haydn’s orchestra consisted of pairs of oboes, horns and bassoons, sometimes adding a flute or two, later adding clarinets after they started cleaning up their ax. Trumpets were only used on “special” occasions (like when you need something loud) and trombones weren’t added to the symphony orchestra until after 1800, anyway. So the horn sort of became a member of the “wind band” by default. A frequent ensemble heard at aristocratic dinner parties and outdoor serenades consisted of pairs of oboes, horns and bassoons (later adding clarinets) - and maybe a string bass to beef up the bass-line. Anyway, I digress (a bit).

In Haydn’s day, these instruments were considerably different from those you’d hear today. Flutes were wooden, keys and other details on all of them were not as extensive as they are now, the horn had no keys (or valves) at all, and the clarinet didn’t really exist except in popular music meant for dancing and even then was fairly primitive compared to the modern instrument.

Not only were their sounds different: mellower, they would have blended better than their modern counterparts which continued evolving through the mid-19th Century. Compared to string players who could be playing instruments made at the time of Johann Sebastian Bach, around the early-1700s, that’s a big difference. (String players like to think of their instruments as having attained perfection earlier.)

A lot of this “evolution” happened because wind players playing in orchestras were now playing in large concert halls, not the music rooms of the aristocracy. Their sound was too mellow. It’s ironic that orchestras would add more violins to beef up the sound and its projection in a bigger hall, but not add more flutes or oboes to do the same thing. Instead, they worked on the instruments themselves to increase their ability to project - and, another irony, to cut through the mass of string sound.

(Side-note: French orchestras got into the habit of writing pairs of winds but using four bassoons because they wanted to bolster the bass-line. Four modern bassoons in some of these scores can create the bull/china-shop effect today.)

And to have these wind instruments duplicating the standard string quartet allocations of melody-bass-and-middle-harmony might place the flute as the equivalent of the 1st Violin, but then the oboe is not an easy instrument to (at least willingly) be subservient about playing the 2nd Violin’s inner harmonies, especially since its lower register is not conducive to balancing with much of anything. This would also put the clarinet at a disadvantage since “inner-harmony parts” would place it in the least adventurous part of its range. (Enough violists have gone into therapy for similar reasons, I suspect.)

And so, the ensemble is better suited to what we call “polyphonic” music – where the individual instruments can serve in melodic or bass-line roles (sound organized horizontally), creating the necessary harmonies by their vertical alignment.

It’s just too bad that composers who wrote such great polyphonic music for string quartets like Beethoven or Brahms never thought to try the same thing with the wind quintet.

Or maybe it was because there weren’t as many professional wind quintets out there begging them to write for them.

Okay, so in this corner you have the chicken – in that corner, the egg...

Given all this, it’s a little unusual – not really, but sort of – to have one of the best known wind quintets, the Dorian Quintet, appearing on the next program with Market Square Concerts when they perform at 8pm on Saturday, March 21st, at Whitaker Center.

They’ll play one of those “early” wind quintets by Friend-of-Beethoven Anton Reicha (actually, they grew up together, playing in the court orchestra in Bonn), the Bartok-inspired Bagatelles by György Ligeti (written in 1953) and a delightful bit of tropical breeze from Cuban-born clarinetist, Pacquito d’Rivera.

To this ensemble of disparate instruments, then, add one that creates its sounds by hammers hitting strings in a wooden box, that can play its own melody/bass-line/harmony but is really a percussion instrument – the piano.

This will add Stuart Malina to the mix, more often seen by local concert-goers playing a stick while standing in front of the Harrisburg Symphony. He’s one of those conductors equally at home as a performer (not that conducting isn’t performing... I just mean... oh, nevermind...) – he loves to play chamber music and has joined the Market Square Concerts roster in the past with various guest string quartets to play some of the finest pieces for the combination by Schumann, Brahms and Shostakovich.

(You can see him next month in a special annual concert called “Stuart & Friends” when he’ll join with several of his colleagues in the orchestra for an evening of chamber music at Whitaker Center on April 28th at 7:30.)

This time, it’s the Sextet for Wind Quintet & Piano by Lee Hoiby – and I’ll tell you more about that and the other music on the program in future posts.

- Dr. Dick

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Photos: Top - Guarneri Quartet who, incidentally, will be playing one of their last concerts - ever! - with Market Square Concerts on April 5th.
2nd - Dorian Wind Quintet (more casual, in a recording session) who are playing on March 21st
3rd - L-R: Viola, Violin & Cello (the 2nd Violin is not a separate instrument: it's a state of mind)
4th - Instruments of the Woodwind Quintet (upright: clarinet, oboe, horn; lying down on the job: flute, bassoon)