Since we went to the preconcert recital, we got to hear the quartet play Mozart's arrangements of Bach fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier, which Emerson is about to release on a new CD. Despite the fact that I own an entire four-CD Well-Tempered Clavier recording, these pieces were not all extremely familiar to me. The fact of the matter is, mine are Glenn Gould recordings for piano, and the most musically-opinionated member of our family has a long-standing revulsion for Glenn Gould, so I seldom get very far into the set.
The recital also featured Mozart's Violin Sonata in E minor, with Jonathan Biss on piano. This one has a poignant falling theme on the piano underscored by a continuous violin line, but I'm not the technical expert on music in the family, so I'll venture no further than that. No doubt I'm saying something wrong as it is! It's a very familiar and favored piece for all of us, though I don't think we have a recording of it. And as usual, the pianist's facial antics were entertaining. What is it with pianists? I guess I was just never good enough at piano to hum to myself while playing concerts. (Biss' bio, above, is quite entertaining.)
The main concert featured Mozart's "Hunt" string quartet, a new piece by Kaija Saariaho commissioned for the Emerson String Quartet, and the Schubert "Trout" piano quintet. The "Hunt" is so familiar that we know almost every note, and it also has that cheerful Mozartian sound that sounds like pure frivolity but isn't, so that was fun. The mood of the Saariaho piece was just the opposite, discordant and full of eerily-textured harmonics. I felt I understood the "big picture" and the details with this piece, but was rather lost in the middle range. (And there were a few distractions, as you will see.) The "Trout" was somewhere in the middle, but much closer to the Mozart, of course. It was less familiar, and longer, with some folk music thrown in, but that made it just the right mix for our family: old, and yet new. Jonathan Biss and bassist Timothy Cobb added even more texture.
Unfortunately, this must have been the worst-behaved audience I've ever been a part of. They weren't purposely badly behaved in the 19th C. sense of actually throwing tomatoes on the stage or heckling the musicians, but coming from a Lincoln Center audience that's supposed to know music, it was sadder. An occasional octogenarian nodding off, a few throat-clearing between movements (at least in January), or an emergency cough-drop wrapper crinkling, I can understand. But blatant seat-shifting during the music? Gripes about not enough Mozart? Sleeping through the entire concert? Applause between movements, and once thunderous applause (and exiting) during a dramatic rest? And then, during the Saariaho, there was that elderly voice from the first-tier balcony. It was like Anne Ramsey's in "Throw Momma from the Train." It was loud, continuous, and very, very hard to ignore.
Still, this wasn't the Emerson String Quartet's fault. Musically speaking, they seem to be on the smoother side of the musical spectrum, even when playing dissonant music. No Pablo Cassals style digging into the strings or Gouldian quirks of timing, at least that I could discern. I kept imagining that the sound had a texture like the highlight on a piece of porcelain, or perhaps like cream soda, but that seems like a better simile for a group of bluegrass fiddlers than a classical chamber group. Champagne, maybe? As you can see, I'm of no help whatsoever in the music criticism department.
I've asked C.Z. to write her own review explaining to me all the things that I only think I heard. She can use musical terms, but she has to explain them so that I will know what she's talking about. Not that I'm going to publish it, which she wouldn't like, but if I'm going to be an educated parental listener, I'd better start learning what it's all about so I can come up with some better descriptors than "cream soda"!
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