The "B" IDENTITY I (QUINTETS)
Monday, January 16, 2012 8pm
William Noll, Music Director & Conductor
Fifth Avenue Chamber Orchestra
The Jasper String Quartet
Ilya Itin, Pianist
Brahms– Quintet in F Minor (1864)
Bartok – Quintet in C Major (1904, revised 1920) 

Tony Madruga

This concert pairs two works for string quartet and piano, written 40 years apart. Johannes Brahms was born in 1833 in Hamburg, Germany, although most of his professional life was spent in Vienna, Austria. Bela Bartok was born in 1881in Sânnicolau Mare, a small town in westernmost part of Romania, along the borders with Serbia and Hungary. As he spent most of his early musical career in Budapest, about 100 miles from Vienna, Bartok certainly would have been aware of the music of Brahms, and the work we will hear bears unmistakable traces of the influence of German romantics such as Brahms and Richard Strauss.

 There are many similarities between these two works and their composers. Both were written relatively early in their respective careers, Brahms at age 31, and Bartok at 23, although both had previously written numerous works for piano, both solo and with strings or voice. Both were known for their piano virtuosity, and both sought to incorporate elements of local folk music in their works. Both had musical parents, and began their studies at an early age, Brahms studying piano from the age of seven. According to the Wikipedia biography of Bartok, “By the age of four, he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano; his mother began formally teaching him the next year.”

Brahms had previously written two piano quartets in 1861. The Quintet in F minor, Opus 34, was originally written as string quintet with two celli in 1862, and was rewritten in 1863 as a Sonata for Two Pianos. At the urging of Clara Schumann, Brahms revised the score again in 1864, this time as a Quintet for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, an ensemble suggested to him by the conductor Hermann Levi. “The Quintet is beautiful beyond words,” Levi wrote. “You have turned a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty, a masterpiece of chamber music.”  Konrad Wolfe, in his liner notes for the Leon Fleisher recording with the Juilliard String Quartet, declared  that “the romanticism of his youth is now fused with his classical leanings in the one hand and his adventurous experimentation in the field of each separate musical element on the other”.

Bela Bartok is considered most important Hungarian composer of 20th century. He entered the Budapest Academy of Music in 1899 and was appointed Professor of Music there in 1907. He met Zoltan Kodaly in 1904 (the same year as the Piano Quintet in C Major was published) and discovered they both shared interest in folk music. Together they collected folk music from all over Eastern Europe, and themes and rhythms from this genre are incorporated in many of his compositions.

 Much of the music written around 1910 is very percussive in nature, reflecting influence of Russian composers such as Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Harold Schonberg, former music critic of the New York Times and author of The Great Pianists (Simon & Schuster, 1963) called Bartok “the greatest of the piano percussionists”, and said that “Bartok’s first two piano concertos, his allegro barbaro and his piano suites, his folk song arrangements and his sonatina, had Prokofiev’s  demonic force coupled to an implacable rhythmic complexity outside anything in Prokofiev’s experience”.

Although the Bartok quintet is not performed with anything like the frequency of the Brahms, it has met with much acclaim by those who have listened to it. For example, the customer reviews on the Amazon.com page for the Naxos label recording by the Kodaly Quartet and pianist Gyorgy Pauk, pairing the quintet with the Bartok Rhapsodies 1 and 2, contain these comments:

The piano quintet is the real jewel on the crown. Its more developed than the other pieces and resembles, stylistically, the mature Bartok pieces we all know and love.

Bartók's early second piano quintet (the first one is lost) is a very fine work, even if the language is more reminiscent of that of Brahms, Liszt or Dohnanyi than his own later style - although there are certainly touches of originality and preechoes of his later style (mostly so in the finale, although the folk touches here are Gipsy rather than Hungarian).

  

Links to performances:

 

Brahms: Quintet in F minor (1864)

I.     Allegro non troppo- Poco sostenuto – Tempo I

II.   Andante, un poco adagio

III. Scherzo, Allegro

IV. Finale, poco sostenuto – Allegro non troppo – tempo I – Presto, non troppo

 

Bartok: Quintet in C major (1904, revised 1920)

I. Andante    II. Vivace: Scherzando   III. Adagio   IV.Poco a poco piu vivace