The Linde Center, Tanlgewood, Sunday, March 23, 2025
Chamber music performance by Boston Symphony Musicians:
Bracha Malkin, Bonnie Bewick, violins; Danny Kim, viola; and Mickey Katz, cello
Program:
Serenade for String Trio, op. 10, by Dohnanyi
String Quartet No. 1 in D, op. 11, by Tchaikovsky
“Polonez” for String Quartet, by Oleg Ponomarev, arranged by Bonnie Bewick
A Hungarian, a Russian, and a Polish Gypsy go into the bar. The Hungarian says, “Let’s relax and have a good time.” After a few drinks, the Russian says, “Let’s get up, dance, and let ourselves go wild.” After a few more drinks, the Polish Gypsy whips out her fiddle and begins sawing away while everyone in the room starts to whirl around to a mad Czardas. That might have been a description of Sunday afternoon’s concert by four string players from the Boston Symphony except that the audience remained in their seats despite the musical incentives to do otherwise.
Ernö von Dohnanyi (1877–1960) was the third and oldest member of a trio of eminent Hungarian composers of his generation whose careers straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, the others being Bela Bartok (1881–1945) and Zoltan Kodaly (1882–1967). Unlike them, he was not active as a folk-music scholar/collector and did not incorporate folk influence into his compositions to the same extent. He received praise from Brahms for an early effort (his Piano Quintet, op. 1), and he adhered to Central European late-Romantic style and harmonic language throughout his long life, during which he was better known as a virtuoso pianist than as a composer. As music director of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1920s, Dohnanyi actively promoted the music of his two younger colleagues. Each of these composers exhibited an individual sense of humor: Bartok’s biting and sardonic, Kodaly’s hearty and down to Earth, and Dohnanyi’s mellow and playful (his most famous piece is his 1914 “Variations on a Nursery Rhyme” for piano and orchestra, the tune in question being “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”).
Dohnanyi’s “Serenade” for string trio, which opened the program, was the composition that I most eagerly anticipated. Chamber music concerts can be brow-wrinkling affairs with string quartets (from Beethoven and later) that challenge the listener to explore profundities and unravel complexities. This is all very edifying, but it is nice even for music reviewers to take a holiday and allow themselves to be entertained in a relatively undemanding way, which is what the genre “serenade” is designed to do. The period from the late 18th to early 19th centuries was the heyday for serenades. At first the aristocracy commissioned them as party music from composers like Mozart (e.g., “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”); then publishers discovered a large middle-class market for sheet music and issued them by the boatload as “house music.” Most of these were for smaller or larger chamber ensembles. The best-known serenades since the late 19th century were mostly for larger (professional) ensembles (e.g., Brahms, Dvorak, Elgar); they succeed very well in capturing the spirit of “gemütlichkeit” but were heard primarily in the concert hall. Chamber serenades persisted, as some composers took a break from exploring the profundities of human experience in their weightier symphonies, concertos, etc. One of my favorites is Schoenberg’s “Serenade” from 1924, but its approach to entertainment is still of the “wrinkled brow” variety and certainly not for amateur players. On the other hand, Dohnanyi’s “Serenade” from 1904 adheres to the most attractive and characteristic qualities of the genre, despite its late-Romantic harmonic vocabulary and absence of clichés. It is for string trio and harks back to a similarly scored work by Beethoven, his “Serenade,” op. 8, published in 1797. Both Beethoven and Dohnanyi adopt a five-movement format, both opening with a March rather than a more portentious sonata-form movement. Both include richly lyrical adagios with plucked string accompaniments imitating the guitar being played beneath a balcony, as well as theme-and-variations movements. Beethoven throws in a folksy “Polacca” while Dohnanyi offers a scintillating “Scherzo” full of diabolical contrapuntal and chromatic mischief. Each in its own way seeks to be entertaining and easy on the ears. In a clever touch, Dohnanyi’s final Rondo fades out with the opening of the March (first movement) as a way of bringing the work around full circle. What is remarkable to me about Dohnanyi’s work is that it uses the complex harmonic and textural resources of late Romanticism (it is, after all, post-Brahms and post-Wagner) but wears them very lightly. It finds a kind of ideal middle path between profundity and frivolity; it attains the Mozartian ideal of rewarding listeners on many levels.
To aficionado’s of chamber music, Tchaikovsky’s first string quartet is no rarity. The central theme of the Andante cantabile is almost one of classical music’s greatest hits. The program notes for this concert point out that the composer had his feet in two different worlds: one in the Austro-German classical tradition and one in the Russian nationalist movement. The quartet is a well-crafted work, beautifully written for the strings, that observes classical decorum regarding form and variety of texture. The first movement opens with a throbbing chordal texture that conceals its metric underpinnings in a very effective way: It seems to be pulsing, but unsteadily, so that it takes a while to discover a pattern, which depends on recognizing a cross-rhythm. (The pattern is 2-3-2-1-1 adding up to nine beats; this will sound off-balance, even to those not trying to keep count). After 15 bars of this (by which time it has become predictable), the second violin begins a melodic pattern that betrays the underlying three-by-three meter more clearly, but 14 bars later, a bar of 12 (four by three) is thrown in to keep things off kilter. This may all refer to the unusual meters of some Russian and Slavic folk music that were later exploited by Stravinsky and Bartok. The quartet continues to display folk characteristics, in the modally inflected harmonies of the first movement, the use of a Ukrainian tune in the second, off-beat stamping rhythms with touches of pentatonic scales in the third, and a cheerful final movement that opens with a strong rhythmic motto (short-short-long) that eventually expands into an exhilarating, dancing finale. The string writing gives the performers every opportunity to shine; in this performance, the first violin (played by Bracha Malkin, who joined her colleagues as first violin) tended to protrude a bit too much, with a bright sound and a rapid vibrato that did not blend well with the rest of the group’s more homogeneous sonority. At the same time, there was unanimity in pacing and mood that allowed the shape of the music to emerge in a way that sacrificed some decorum for the sake of excitement.
In a preview in The Berkshire Edge, my colleague David Edwards interviewed violinist Bonnie Bewick who supplied extensive information about her string quartet arrangement of “Polonez” which served as the closing tasty “morsel” (as she described it from the stage) to this very listener-friendly program. Fitting into the Hungarian Rhapsody tradition, the work evolved from an improvisatory solo introduction (performed by Ms. Bewick) to a marked rhythmic pattern (long-short-short-long) familiar from the works of Liszt, Kodaly, Bartok, etc. This led to a headlong second movement loaded with high-energy dance rhythms. What only needs to be added is that the players dug into the skillfully crafted parts and virtuoso solos with relish, including moments where the players stamped in unison, obviously enjoying themselves as they hurtled forward to the frenzy of the final Czardas. At the conclusion, the audience stirred from their usual sedentary positions to one appropriate for a standing ovation. Non-alcoholic refreshments followed.
