"Songs of Praise" - the Carmel Quartet opens the 2021-2022 concert season with works of Ives, Haydn and Beethoven

Rachel Ringelstein,Yoel Greenberg,Tami Waterman,Tali Goldberg (courtesy Carmel Quartet)

 

What happens when the location, time or words of a national anthem are changed? What happens when songs of national character are quoted in classical works?  In "Songs of Praise", the opening event of the Carmel Quartet's 2021-2022 "Strings and More" series, Dr. Yoel Greenberg, presenter of the narrated series, addresses this question. Founded in 2000, today's members of the Carmel Quartet (Israel) are violinists Rachel Ringelstein and Tali Goldberg, violist Yoel Greenberg and 'cellist Tami Waterman. This writer attended the series' English language program at the Jerusalem Music Centre, Mishkenot Sha'ananim on October 27th 2021.

 

The concert began with the members performing a Stephen Foster song in the manner that might have represented the singing of American plantation workers, the song's lyrics today considered racist. American modernist composer Charles Ives grew up with Foster's songs, frequently quoting them in his works. What singularizes Ives' music is his experimenting with many of the new compositional techniques years before his European counterparts. This was obvious in the Carmel Quartet's performance of his Scherzo for String Quartet, a miniature work that presents the composer's whimsical side. It quotes from such sources as the hymn "Bringing in the Sheaves", Stephen Foster's "Massa's in de Cold Ground", "My Old Kentucky Home" and there is a canon on James Thornton's "hoochy-koochy" dance. The middle section incorporates a musical joke Ives called "Practice for String Q[uartet] In Holding Your Own". A barrage of frenetic cacophony "accompanies" the songs, many of which are played by the 'cello. Certainly a different chamber work to open the concert season, indeed, confrontational...and over in the wink of an eye! 

 

Greenberg discussed the fragile nature of hymns and anthems - official public works that tend to become offensive when misused, if the words are changed. One of the most extreme instances of this is the transformation undergone by "Gott erhalte Franz der Kaiser" (God save Emperor Francis), an anthem Joseph Haydn wrote to the greater glory of Emperor Francis II. It became the national anthem of Austria-Hungary, then the German national anthem, the Deutschlandlied, as it was referred to, eventually becoming a dire association with the Nazi era. (Protests existed, for example, Erwin Schulhoff's "Symphonia Germanica" for voice and piano, a raucous, distasteful parody of German patriotic music. Viktor Ullmann's one-act opera "Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verweigerung" (The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death) was written in the Terezin concentration camp. The Nazis, however, did not allow it to be performed there.) Haydn's Quartet No. 62 in C major Op. 76 No. 3, influenced by his London visits, where he had been exposed to the newly emerging genre of the national anthem, is referred to as the "Emperor" due to its set of variations on this anthem in the second movement. Greenberg asked the audience to put aside the painful associations of the melody, rather to listen to the work as an instance of Haydn's sublime music. Indeed, the Carmel players gave expression to the Haydnesque joy and freshness of the first movement, with its appearance of a folk-like drone, this followed by the variety and sheer beauty of the 2nd movement variations, then the charming Minuet with its more demure trio, the quartet ending with the more tempestuous, virtuosic but also lyrical Finale.

 

The commission for L.van Beethoven's three Op.59 quartets (1805-1806) was from Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna of the time and a very able second violinist in his own quartet. (Its first violin was Ignaz Schuppanzigh, a friend and perhaps violin teacher to Beethoven.) The three very long and difficult "Razumovsky" string quartets left both their first performers and the public shocked and suspicious. Opening with two loud chords followed by a bar's silence, to be followed by a few bars of breathless, mysterious music and yet another charged silence, the Carmel Quartet players' reading of Op.59 No.2 was gripping and powerful. In contrast to the agitation of the first movement, they carried the unrushed, lengthy melodic phrases of the Molto Adagio, suffused with an austerely expressive hymn-like tune, through its dotted rhythm assertion, into a double dotted figure, to conclude in sublimely soaring triplets. The third movement (Allegretto) opened with jolly dancelike and playful utterances and with off-beat rhythms. Its Trio, conceding to Razumovsky's request, quotes a Russian theme, "Glory to the Sun", Beethoven’s light-hearted setting of it, however, totally lacking in Russian formality and ceremoniousness, the quartet drawing to an end with the ebullient Finale that returns to the symphonic ambience of the opening Allegro. 

 

Ringelstein, Goldberg, Greenberg and Waterman are among Israel's very finest string players, but it is the focus, conviction and total immersion of the Carmel Quartet members that never fail to draw audiences into the many levels making up the fabric of each work. Yoel Greenberg's talks are informative and articulate, always with touches of humour. Also adding interest to "Songs of Praise" event were several rare film clips and pictures.