Music chronicle

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Clark, Robert S

IT IS ALL TOO EASY TO GET DOWN IN THE MOUTH when surveying New York's cultural horizon. But just when you think the forces of mediocrity, political reductionism, and Disneyfication are about to drive out the real cultural currency, a development comes along that lifts the spirits. Such was the creation late last year of the Neue Galerie New York, a new institution devoted to German and Austrian art, and particularly that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a beautiful Beaux Arts townhouse on the Upper East Side. The private collections of painting, sculpture, works on paper and decorative arts of the late art dealer Serge Sabarsky and the philanthropist and collector Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics heir and former U.S. ambassador to Austria, are the heart of the museum's holdings, but it plans nothing less than a comprehensive showcase of the arts so vividly alive in Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere in Central Europe during those decades. The Galerie is offering lectures by curators and historians, documentary films, cabaret (Ute Lemper appeared there last spring), and, with the Bard Music Festival, monthly chamber concerts organized around Central European works and their developmental relationship to the Austrian and German classics of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and others.

As Robert Martin, Bard's vice president for academic affairs and dean of graduate studies, put it in remarks before the concerts in April and May, each program will couple works that were probably treasured by the audiences that first heard them with works that likely offended the audiences that first heard them. The juxtaposition is intended to suggest the continuity between the two. Quoting Felix Galimir, the great Austrian violinist and champion of the modernist Second Viennese School, Martin added that Galimir insisted that Webern be played with the same attack and phrasing as Beethoven or Brahms.

Webern was on the first program of the current year, early in April, paired with the String Quartet No. 3 of Johannes Brahms. Two poles of Webern's style were represented: the early Langsamer Satz ("Slow Movement") for string quartet, written in an idiom close to Mahler and Brahms but stretched chromatically to its limits, and the Five Pieces for String Quartet, written in 1909, only five years after the Langsamer Satz, but totally transformed in style. These aphoristic pieces seem to compress the material into tiny episodes of statement, response, variation, and recapitulation, mimicking classical techniques but never developing or resolving them tonally. Lucy Miller's valuable program notes quoted from Barbara Zuber: "It is as though the genre of the string quartet had imploded to its very minimum, as though form and structure had been so condensed that only their essence remained."

The all-female Colorado String Quartet Julie Rosenfeld and Deborah Redding, violins; Marka Gustavson, viola; and Diane Chaplin, cello), currently in residence at Bard College, gave a finely judged performance of this sometimes gripping, sometimes enigmatic music. Contrasts were marked, but where called for the abrupt phrases seemed to cohere into larger lines. The group also handled the solemn, almost despairing Langsamer Satz well, suggesting its poignancy without lapsing into bathos.

Closing the program was the last of Brahms's three quartets-an apt choice, as the tonal ambiguity of some passages, particularly the chromaticism prominent in the agitato third movement, points in the atonal direction in which Schonberg and Webern were headed. The Colorado brought plenty of vigor to the vivace opening movement, appropriately so, although the acoustics of the drawing room venue for the concerts lent a hard edge to some of the concerted passages. The Schubertian second movement displayed lyrical clarity and well-- balanced ensemble blend, and the finely wrought third movement, with its long viola cantilena against muted strings, its chromatics and its wide-stretching intervals, was remarkable for its expressive force. The final variations, with their reprises of themes from the other movements, brought the performance to a rich and satisfying close.

For the May concert, it was an ingenious idea to couple Schubert's Fantasy in C Minor for violin and piano (D. 934) with Schonberg's Phantasy for violin with piano accompaniment (Op. 47), both splendidly played by the young violinist Scott St. John, accompanied by Pei Yao Wang. Both are works of great musical inventiveness. Schubert treats the two instruments as equals, but in Schonberg's piece the violin is clearly dominant-mirroring the fact that the string line was composed first and accompaniment added afterward. As one might expect, the Schubert fantasy, played without pause, is a series of charming and beautiful melodic lines skillfully manipulated in the composer's late manner. A slow, caressing opening statement leads to a jaunty allegretto and then to a rondo with a distinct gypsy flavor. A set of variations based on Schubert's song Sei mir gegrusst follows, and the closing section brings a reprise of the opening theme.