Peachtree String Quartet brings warmth and light to a damp, dreary day with music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Webern | EarRelevant

CONCERT REVIEW:

Peachtree String Quartet
February 11, 2024
Garden Hills Recreation Center
Atlanta, GA – USA
Christopher Pulgram & Robert Anemone, violins; Yang-Yoon Kim, viola, Thoman Carpenter, cello; Jesse McCandless, clarinet.
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 2 in G major, Op. 18, No. 2
Anton WEBERN: Langsamer Satz
Johannes BRAHMS: Clarinet Quintet in B-minor, Op. 115

Mark Gresham | 13 FEB 2024

Temperate but wet weather was the order of the day on Sunday afternoon at Garden Hills Recreation Center in Atlanta, where the Peachtree String Quartet performed its Winter concert featuring the chamber music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Webern.

In contrast to the gloomy gray weather, violinists Christopher Pulgram and Robert Anemone, violist Yang-Yoon Kim, and cellist Thomas Carpenter opened the program with Beethoven’s sunny String Quartet in G major, Op. 18, No. 2.

Of Beethoven’s six Op. 18 quartets, it is the most deeply rooted in 18th-century musical tradition. Written between 1798 and 1800, it shows stylistic similarities to Haydn’s Opus 77, No. 1 quartet from the same period (1799). Interestingly, both are nicknamed “Komplimentier-Quartett” (literally “Complimenting Quartet,” referencing courtly social bows and curtseys).

The lively “Allegro” opening movement poses tempo challenges due to some rapid ornamental moments. It typically comes across with more of an “Allegretto” character at best, which suits the music, and the PSQ musicians found a happy pace.

Likewise, the second movement, with the opening tempo marked “Adagio cantabile,” requires a balance between calmness and maintaining a steady pace, with musicians navigating nuances of the time signature and tempo change at the “Allegro” middle section, then a return to the original “Adagio” after. The musicians managed the relationships between sections well, with good choices that felt natural.

Then came a brisk Scherzo and Trio (“Allegro”) followed by a scurrying Finale (“Allegro molto, quasi presto”) with a principal theme that hearkens back to the distinctive rhythm of a secondary theme from the first movement (first heard in meas. 21) that lends additional unification to the whole Quartet, which concluded cheerfully.

Following the brilliance of Beethoven’s early-period Quartet No. 2 came a total shift to music of a passionate romantic character with Anton Webern’s Lansamer Satz (“Slow Movement”), inspired by a walk outside Vienna with his cousin (and future wife) Wilhelmine Mortl, with whom he had fallen in love. At the time (1905), Webern was a first-year student of Arnold Schoenberg, who had extended and somewhat merged elements of the conflicting Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner (some years before he developed his revolutionary dodecaphonic technique).

Composed in C minor and marked “Langsam, mit bewegtem Ausdruck” (“Slow, with moving expression”), Webern’s Langsamer Satz harkened back to the tradition of Johannes Brahms in terms of rich sonority and rhetorical elements but in a manner more comparable to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, conveying profound emotional expressions of yearning, dramatic tension, and serene calmness over its eight-minute duration.

After intermission, guest clarinetist Jesse McCandless joined the string players for the Clarinet Quintet in B-minor, Op. 115, of Johannes Brahms. It is one of the two towering pillars of chamber repertoire for clarinet and string quartet (the other being that of Mozart) and one of his late chamber works, created after Brahms had officially “retired” from composing. As “autumnal” as it is, McCandless and the Peachtree String Quartet gave it a warm and buoyant reading that was not quite as dark as is often heard, serving well as a final comfortable counter to the day’s damp and mildly mirthless weather. ■

EXTERNAL LINKS:

Peachtree String Quartet: peachtreestringquartet.org
Jesse McCandless: aso.org/artists/detail/jesse-mccandless

About the author:

Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. He began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.

Read more by Mark Gresham.