Portland Press Herald
Thursday, August 21, 2003
Concert Review of Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Quartet shines in difficult Berg
The Maine audience for chamber music continues to grow. The opening nights of both the Portland Chamber Music Festival and the Salt Bat Chamberfest at Round Top Center for the Arts in Damariscotta, on Tuesday, had the best attendance in several years.

Both festivals raise the level of excitement with new and sometimes daring works, leavening a selection of more classical pieces.

The Brentano String Quartet at Salt Bay played a version of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite that bordered on heresy, but it worked, marvelously.

Some might say that playing Berg's serial masterpiece at all is frightening enough to the average audience, but the quartet added a hidden song in the final movement, discovered in an annotated manuscript found in New Jersey (I kid you not).

The manuscript, with voluminous notes written in the composer's own hand, indicated an entire program for the work -- an unhappy love affair with a married woman - and a hidden poem in the final movement, "De profundis clamavi," by Baudelaire. Berg apparently had set the poem, then eliminated it, leaving the melody as a series of notes alternating among the string parts.

These notes were circled on the manuscript. Berg's idea, in keeping with the dictum that "less is more," was to increase the devastating emotional impact by making the audience feel that something (the song) was missing. Since the negative space can be appreciated only by trained musicians (and I suspect few of them), the work is better with the song, which reminds one of the "Altenberger Lieder."

The entire performance of the Lyric Suite was superb, demonstrating what Berg could do as a dramatist within the severe constraints of the 12-tone system. He managed a Viennese waltz, a kind of false fugue in the penultimate presto delirando, and the most pianissimo movement ever written for string quartet, while staying within Schoenberg's rigid confines. The rendition of the final song, by mezzo-soprano Theodora Hanslowe, gave the suite just the operatic climax it deserved. I think Berg, in these post-Freudian days of easy divorce, would have liked this version better himself. Otherwise, why not burn the manuscript?

Hanslowe also appeared in a selection of five songs by Hugo Wolf, accompanied by pianist Tom Sauer, whom I heard last week in the Liebeslieder Waltzes. While well sung, they were less moving than the Berg, especially given Wolf's predilection for florid piano parts. The last one, "Er Ist's" was a short piano concerto with vocal accompaniment.

The program began with a surprisingly fresh and heartfelt reading of the popular Mozart Piano Quartet in G Minor (KV 478), with Sauer, festival founder Mina Smith on cello, Mark Steinberg on violin and Hsin-Yun Huang on viola.

The festival runs through August 29.

Christopher Hyde’s Classical Beat Column appears in the Maine Sunday Telegram.