The Amenda Quartet has played all
kinds of music during its short six years, but it has remained true to its
initial conception. The quartet — violinists (and married couple) Patricia Sunwoo and David Brickman; violist Melissa Matson; and
cellist Mimi Hwang — formed with the goal to learn all of Beethoven’s string
quartets. (The group’s namesake is Karl Friedrich Amenda,
a violinist and pastor who rates at least a passing mention in most Beethoven
biographies; the composer called him his “dear, good, sincere friend.”)
After performances of individual quartets here and there, the
Amenda Quartet plunged into “Project Ludwig” for the
2015-16 concert season. The season would be focused on presenting all of
Beethoven’s music for string quartet, with performances at venues across the
city and region, from Rochester Contemporary Art Center and the Brainery to Buckland Park and Canandaigua’s Sonnenberg Gardens.
This weekend finds the Amenda
Quartet in the Unitarian Church’s First Muse chamber music series. And next
month, it will conclude the series with Op. 130 at the South Avenue Mission
Church.
The quartet’s preoccupation is in a collection of 16 works
“on the bucket list for most string players,” Sunwoo
says. They contain some of Beethoven’s most visionary, demanding music — to
play, and infinitely rewarding to listen to.
Beethoven’s first six string quartets, Opus 18, “seem so
simple,” Sunwoo says. “But you’re also aware that
Beethoven had just arrived in Vienna and was aware of his greatness.”
There are hints of sprawl, one might say, in the earlier,
more Mozartian quartets, written around 1800, and
also touches of classical form, which helped to shape the hugely conceived
landscapes of his later works.
“It’s a lot easier for me to know my role in the Opus 18
quartets,” Matson says. “The viola is obviously a supporting voice throughout.
But in a late Beethoven quartet, I’ll be given just three notes and have to
figure out how they fit into the texture. The later works are much more awkward
instrumentally.”
The Amenda Quartet is pairing Beethoven’s
final quartet with his first — at least in published order — for its
performance on Sunday. The early work exudes confidence and charm; the final
work covers much more profound territory. Its final movement begins with a
question-and-answer motive over which Beethoven wrote the phrases “Must it be?
It must be!” The finale expresses the confidence of someone who has
successfully come through a dark night of the soul.
The concert also includes Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” or “Great Fugue,” a 15-minute work that was
originally intended as part of Opus 130, but whose intellectuality and
relentless energy dwarf the quartet completely. Whether played in its original
place, or on its own, the piece is a tremendous challenge. Regarded as
bizarrely dissonant and unplayable in the 19th century, it came into its own in
the 20th: Igor Stravinsky called it “an absolutely contemporary piece of
music that will be contemporary forever.”
“I’ve come to playing these quartets from being steeped in
playing Beethoven’s orchestral music,” says Brickman, until recently a longtime
RPO violinist. “You can’t play them without thinking of the symphonies. The
ending of ‘Grosse Fuge,’ with everybody running
around joyously in 6/8 — it’s the same feeling you get at the ending of the
Ninth Symphony.”
At the end of his life, Beethoven was deaf, and his inability
to hear what he had written probably led him to write in a sometimes cryptic,
abstracted style that mystified many of his contemporaries — “unmoored from
acoustics,” as Matson puts it. This music can still challenge modern players
and listeners, even though they can sense the philosophical depth behind it.
“There’s a quote of Beethoven saying, in effect, ‘When I’m
composing I don’t give a damn about your fiddle,'” Brickman says.
As opposed to a more formal chamber music setting like the
Eastman School’s Kilbourn or Hatch Halls, the venues
used during Project Ludwig have offered the chance to be up close and personal.
“When you’re in a small venue like RoCo,” Matson says,
“you and the audience get very caught up in the creation of the music.”
The members of the quartet admit that full-time ensembles
spend much more time polishing interpretations — taking up to 50 rehearsals on
one piece. “After six years together, we’ve become much more efficient,” Matson
says. “When you know that if you suddenly decide you want to play something a
certain way, and that if you do, everyone else will go along with you, it’s a
great feeling.”
This article appears in May 11-17, 2016.
