What: Early Music Society of the Islands: String quartets by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, with the Chiaroscuro Quartet
When/where: Saturday March 9, 8 p.m., Alix Goolden Performance Hall, 907 Pandora Ave; pre-concert talk at 7:10 p.m.
Tickets: $30, seniors and students $25, members $23, student rush $8. Call 250-386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at the McPherson Box Office, Ivy’s Bookshop, Munro’s Books and Long & McQuade
The early-music movement and the historical-performance movement have always overlapped to a great extent, and the terms are often used interchangeably. But they are not the same thing.
The former focuses on a repertoire, music of the 18th century and earlier. The latter is a philosophy, according to which the conditions and practices that prevailed at the time of a work’s composition should determine how it is performed today.
When the historical-performance movement was new, it focused exclusively on early music, where the relevance of scholarly research and the benefits of unseating conventional performance practices were most glaringly apparent. More recently, however, historical-performance specialists have been creeping forward chronologically, tackling more and more of the standard repertoire: Beethoven, the early Romantics, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Mahler.
This music, too, it turns out, raises significant performance issues; only complacency and convention ever allowed us to think otherwise. Chopin’s piano and Brahms’s horn were no less in need of rehabilitation than were the crumhorn and the sackbut.
If you accept the premises of historical performance, in fact, then no repertoire is outside your purview, and you find “period instrument” issues everywhere, even in modern music: works conceived for Wanda Landowska’s idiosyncratic harpsichord or for early electronic instruments and synthesizers, Cage’s piece for 12 radios, Ligeti’s piece for 100 hand-wound metronomes.
The Early Music Society of the Islands mainly programs repertoire from the mid-1700s and earlier, though it has occasionally offered late 18th- and early 19th-century repertoire, too.
It will do so again on Saturday, when it will sponsor an appearance by the Chiaroscuro Quartet, an acclaimed European string quartet.
Founded in 2005, the Chiaroscuro is devoted to historically informed performance of Classical and early-Romantic literature, which includes using period bows to play instruments strung with gut rather than steel, and the results are distinctive in terms of sound, style and rhetoric.
The Chiaroscuro’s members come from Russia, Spain, Sweden and France. Since 2009, they have been in artists-in-residence at the Musée national de Port-Royal des Champs, a historic estate near Paris. But they also perform at prestigious festivals and elsewhere around the world (this week, they appeared at Carnegie Hall in New York), often in collaboration with renowned colleagues. They have recorded six CDs, of works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn.
On Saturday, the Chiaroscuro will perform three popular masterpieces spanning the four decades straddling 1800: Haydn’s Joke Quartet; Beethoven’s Op. 18/No. 6; and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, so nicknamed because its slow movement is a set of variations on the theme of Schubert’s own song of that title.
(Death and the Maiden and a quartet Schubert wrote when he was 18 comprise the Chiaroscuro’s most recent CD, released in October on the BIS label.)
Haydn’s Joke is one of his innovative and influential Op. 33 quartets, published in 1782, and its nickname refers to an especially slapstick specimen of his trademark musical wit, in the closing bars.
(As recently as summer 2016, I witnessed the power of this gag to still dupe listeners, to their delight.)
The Beethoven was published in 1801 as part of his first set of quartets and he placed it at the end of the set for a reason: It is the one in which he most conspicuously escapes from the enormous shadow of Haydn. That is evident in the music’s proportions and rhetoric, and in its plentiful novelties, particularly the mysterious slow introduction to the finale, which Beethoven titled La Malinconia (Melancholy) without explaining why.
As for the highly original and profoundly Romantic Death and the Maiden, it is one of Schubert’s darkest, most troubled works, Beethovenian in scale, depth and expressive power, though also beholden to Rossini’s lyricism and the Viennese idiom.
Alas, like Schubert’s other large-scale works, it was received warily by contemporary listeners. The renowned violinist whose quartet first performed the work, privately, in 1826, was a keen advocate of new music and of Schubert, yet after the performance had only this to say to the composer: “My dear fellow, this is no good, leave it alone — stick to your songs.”
