Revealing inner lives

Perhaps "quest" is the operative descriptive to link the three works on this deep feel program on March 13. What's the personal perspective for a human about to enter a ring on foot and confront a bull who has been maddened by body piercings? Joaquin Turina, in 1925, visited a small chapel at the site of the confrontational bullring in Sevilla. In this set-aside space, the enthusiastic shoutings and jostling of the crowd, with money on the odds one way or the other, was shut out. It's the toreador and his humanity praying for his life and yet recognizing the possible outcome for the bull. Each has a 'life on the line.' Vivid musical imagery conjures up an event in this taught, short, subdued work, both a prayer and an acknowledgment of a culture that sees fervor in the confrontation of man against animal. Must one or the die this very day, or are they fated to live to meet again another time? 

Is Janáček's String Quartet No. 2 ("Intimate Letters") about a true yet unrequited love, or is it a one-sided obsession by an older man for a younger woman who is not returning his infatuation? What feels wrong here? Subtitled "Intimate Letters," in four movements, we are taken into the inner world of the composer, revealing his own thoughts and emotions. Is Leos Janacek, at age seventy, thrusting us into a situation of voyeurism for a window into his recent past? Is he sensing his mortality and asking for our indulgence? Nicholas Johnson, in his program notes upfront, cites 1928 as the year of composing and the year of death. The viola carries the brunt of this unfolding. Putting aside my skepticism to embrace the reason behind the work, I admit to admiring the beauty of the work. Part One: Man sees a woman and is enraptured. She hardly notices. Part Two: Man pursues with letters. Does she reply? I don't know since there are only his letters on record. Part Three: Yearning for what doesn't happen or no show for intimacy. Part Four: Hmm—is the composer coming up just short of admitting he has been kidding himself for a couple of decades? But, on the other hand, am I missing the point, and this really just is an ode to the need for a 'muse' to spark what, at the time, was Janacek's dry spell?

No matter my thoughts, it's amazing music gloriously played, and it's one of the works where the viola gets the best lines, so to speak. But be assured the two violins and the cello also deliver star roles. The Dover is masterful in showing the emotional core of a particular person, and then is sharing this on a wider broadband. Sensitivity at the center.

Franz Schubert's lament 200 years ago, with his 1824 String Quartet No. 14, is as fresh a reality now as it was then about the reality of death before we are ready to succumb to it. If it's not yet one controllable disease, it's another. Bad microbes never stop undermining our human form. How do we reconcile the desire to live with knowing we are on the path to death? Schubert did not gain Beethoven's longevity. Though Schubert outlived Beethoven by a year, Schubert died at age 31, and Beethoven lived to age 57—neither achieved "old age. "Much as we wish, living is a finite enterprise. The raw emotion within No. 14, also tagged as "Death and the Maiden," is gut-wrenching despite its seeming quiet conciliation. 

If violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violist Julianne Lee, and cellist Camden Shaw earn our admiration for their individual and collective insightful playing of Turina and Janacek, it is even more so for their tenderness in addressing the gut-wrenching reality for Schubert that we stood to applaud and to call them back. We were aware the foursome had to be on the road ASAP to get to their next concert destination, and we were grateful they had made time to fill in this date for us.

"Death and the Maiden," re-sung here, could be the successful opera that eluded Schubert. Its story incorporates the poem by Matthias Claudius, which reminds Johnson in his notes. How do we, while living, wrap our mind around the "terror and the eventual comfort from death"? 

The Maiden squares off against this 'grisly man of bone' admonishing him, "Life is sweet, is pleasant./ Go! Leave me now alone!" And shoos definitively, "Go! leave me now alone."

But Death is beguiling: "Give me thy hand, oh! maiden fair to see,/for I'm a friend, hath never distress thee." And the kicker? It takes courage to die, he tells The Maiden. 

Schubert is being equally beguiling in his 'musical devices' that Johnson itemizes. In reality, listening, I'm not parsing music theory. I'm not wide-eyed at the complexity. I'm completely absorbed in this macabre dance, the sting that pushes an unsuspecting person into madness. The players are blithely handing off the arguments between the two, but I know they share a level of virtuosity that will leave them drenched. I was on the edge of my seat. No way to beg your being out of the ultimate ending…death is finite, but this Quartet is not going away.

Throughout, the power of music can take us from private moments before facing a roaring crowd, before admitting it's been a one-way infatuation, before facing terror with valor.

Cover image courtesy of Roy Cox.