Review: Cambridge Early Music: Musikverein: The Revolutionary Drawing Room
By John Gilroy
The Cambridge Early Music concert season continued on Friday evening (25 October) at St Catharine’s College Chapel, Cambridge, with a programme focusing on the Romantic period, a period of political upheaval and bloody revolution, but one which also produced major composers writing for patrons and entertaining the drawing rooms of Europe.
Among them was Franz Schubert, two of whose chamber works were performed on Friday evening by the distinguished quartet ‘The Revolutionary Drawing Room’.
The first was a solitary movement (1820) of a putative quartet never to be completed, and followed by one of the masterworks of chamber music, the Quintet in C major D 956.
The quartet comprises the wonderful talents of Adrian Butterfield (violin), Dominika Fehér (violin) Rachel Stott (viola) and Ruth Alford (cello) who were joined by their guest cellist, Andrew Skidmore, for the last of Schubert’s chamber works, sometimes known as the Cello Quintet whose two cellos replace the more usual double violas employed.
But first in the programme came the Quartettsatz in C minor D 703, written as an allegro assai but fated to stand alone, although 40 bars of a following ‘andante’ movement were also written.
Various theories have since been advanced as possible reasons why Schubert might have abandoned his composition.
Even as it stands it is a lovely piece. It begins at a vigorous pace, and soon dissolves into one of those pure melodies to which Schubert had seemingly inexhaustible access.
The quartet therefore remained as it is, maybe because the composer got distracted by something else, or he felt that he couldn’t continue on the level of inspiration the first movement contained.
Who knows? The actuality remains a mystery. But what is true of the period in which Schubert was writing was its pre-occupation with the fragmentary and the incomplete.
Such things, far from representing weakness or indecision became a virtue of sorts, a kind of authenticity in Romanticism’s creations bearing witness to the artist’s struggle with his work.
James Joyce, for example, in his portrait of the would-be Romantic creator Stephen Dedalus (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) describes how Stephen had it in mind not to occupy the main role of ‘artist’ or at mass the priestly celebrant himself, but simply that of an acolyte who constantly aspires to such a role, rather than fulfilling it.
The Romantic period is filled with works which represent the genuine, and often painful, aspirations of poets and artists in the process of creation rather than in the production of a definitive and comparatively unsatisfactory completion of their ideas.
Schubert’s ‘unfinished’ 8th symphony is a prominent example, and maybe also in this respect is his Quartettsatz, D703.
Often and seemingly in synchrony with the fragmentary and unfinished were the comparatively brief and unfinished lives of many of the era’s towering dead, for example Keats at 25, Shelley 29, Byron 36, and of course Schubert himself at 31.
As ever, the response to such loss is the question of what might have been. Nowhere does this apply as readily as it does to Schubert’s tragic departure (the composer barely out of his 30s), and to his last chamber composition completed within weeks of his death in the autumn of 1828.
The Quintet in C major (D 956) has its place among the greatest of all chamber works. It’s a passionate composition, full of fight and power as in its final movement (the composer, as it were, raging against the dying of the light).
But equally it contains a multitude of discordances together with longer passages of sorrow as in the Quintet’s beautifully rendered adagio whose pizzicato exchanges among groups of instruments is like the slow ticking of a clock marking time.
With its distinguished performers now made even more so by the addition of Andrew Skidmore’s cello, a certain depth and profundity was added to passages such as those in the galloping Scherzo where the cellos provide a rustic droning, arguably more effective than two violas might have been able to create.
And of course one of the values of attending a real performance is that it’s possible to observe which instruments are making which sounds.
So for example in the last movement the viola’s striking and overarching presence might easily perhaps be overlooked in a recording, while the collective musicianship of the quintet was at a premium as its impeccable fading tones added a particular live intensity to the second movement’s final notes.
The Revolutionary Drawing Room made a memorable contribution to Cambridge Early Music’s programme this season.
The Quartet (plus one) collectively displayed superb consolidation and musicianship throughout, as well as communicating a deeply emotive response and their obvious devotion to the music of this glorious composer.