Lenox — Boston Symphony musicians Sheila Fiekowsky, Lisa Kim, Mary Ferrillo, Daniel Getz, Adam Esbensen, and Oliver Aldort will perform a program of Shaw, Prokofiev, and Brahms at Tanglewood’s Linde Center on Sunday, April 16 at 3 p.m.
Carolyn Shaw provides a wonderfully succinct description of the first piece on Sunday’s program: “In Limestone & Felt, the hocketing pizzicato and pealing motivic canons are part of a whimsical, mystical, generous world of sounds echoing and colliding in the imagined eaves of a gothic chapel.” Scored for viola and cello, Shaw’s piece will resonate nicely in the Linde Center’s Studio E.
Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata for two violins, Op. 56 is “interesting enough to listen to for 10 or 15 minutes …” That, at least, was the standard the composer set for himself when he accepted the challenge of writing a better piece for two unaccompanied violins than the “unsuccessful” attempt he had recently heard performed.
“Listening to bad music sometimes inspires good ideas,” he quipped.
Actually, Prokofiev’s sonata is interesting for a few different reasons, and not all of them are audible (e.g., his changing relationship with the Soviet Union). Everything Prokofiev wrote was a strange blend of classical and modern influences suffused with the composer’s innate brand of whimsy. In other words, it’s hard to think of any piece by Prokofiev that doesn’t pass the 15-minute test. Prokofiev’s sonata clocks in at about 14 minutes.
Johannes Brahms was a cad, and his String Sextet No. 2 in G major constitutes his own admission of it. The piece concerns itself with the composer’s girlfriend, Agathe von Seibold, to whom the 32-year-old composer had confessed devotion but refused to marry.
“I love you,” he wrote, “but I cannot wear fetters!”
And with that, the relationship ended. Years later, Brahms admitted having wronged the girl: “I have played the scoundrel toward Agathe,” he confessed in a letter to a friend. “Here,” he wrote, in reference to the sextet in G, “I have freed myself from my last love.”
But instead of carving her initials into the side of a tree, Brahms had carved the letters of Agathe’s name into the score of his sextet, and you can hear the corresponding notes in the first movement’s opening measures. (He omitted the T, and H is the note B in German.)
Beyond these purely technical facts, there’s nothing to suggest that Brahms intended any kind of program for this sextet. Yet there’s a storytelling quality to it, especially in the second and third movements. Of course, we can always say the piece simply reflects Brahms’ personal struggles and passions. But some listeners will detect a narrative of sorts—a story with no plot but plenty of drama and conflicting emotion.
Maybe his harmonies are merely chords, but you and I and Carl Jung know perfectly well that Brahms couldn’t possibly have concealed from us how he felt about Agathe von Seibold while composing a piece dedicated to his memory of her.
Hear Sheila Fiekowsky, Lisa Kim, Mary Ferrillo, Daniel Getz, Adam Esbensen, and Oliver Aldort perform a program of Shaw, Prokofiev, and Brahms at Tanglewood’s Linde Center on Sunday, April 16 at 3 p.m. Tickets here.
