Evoke the ñiqui, ñaque, ñoca of the tiny orchestra of insects and amphibians that liven up the Walpurgis Night Dreamin Splendor, by Goethe, next to the magic bagpipe that hypnotizes them with soap bubbles. It is the challenge that a teenager Felix Mendelssohn set himself, in 1825, when writing the novel scherzo from his Octet for strings, op. twenty.
We know this from the testimony of his sister Fanny. A prodigious sound universe where the 16-year-old composer deploys all kinds of jumping bow strokes to represent crickets and frogs, buzzing trills reminiscent of flies, energetic spiccati for mosquito bites. And he also does not renounce the sound of the bagpipe with fifths and octaves in the violins, seasoned by elusive figurations in the violas that rise into the air.
The extraordinary Belcea and Ébène quartets worked hard to find the ideal sound of that dreamlike Goethian intermediate recreated by Mendelssohn. His performance, on Thursday, May 23, in the Chamber Hall of the National Auditorium, made it a reality a concert that disrupted the pandemic in January 2022. On that occasion, the damn virus infected three of the eight members of the two quartets, and their collaboration as an octet was limited to Quintet D. 956by Schubert.
But of those five musicians who performed in 2022, only three remain today. In 2023, the Belcea Quartet replaced the Frenchman Axel Schacher, its second violin, with the Korean-Australian Suyeon Kang. And the Ébène has suffered this season from the retirement of Raphaël Merlin, its founding cellist, who has been replaced, after 25 years, by the Japanese Yuya Okamoto. The reasons for both departures have been professional, since Schacher is the concertmaster of the Basel Symphony and Merlin conducts the Geneva Chamber Orchestra. Added to all this was the eventual indisposition of Ébène’s first violinist, Pierre Colombet, relieved on this tour by the young Jonathan Schwarz, leader of the Leonkoro Quartet.
All these eventualities do not seem to have affected the result of the collaboration of two of the best quartets in the world, which This Friday they continue their international tour at the Bilbao Philharmonic. But to the famous scherzo Mendelssohnian lacked some evanescent fluidity. And his timbral phantasmagoria ended with some jammed trill, slight mismatches or the accident of a pizzicato furtive in the final scale of the first violin. A crucial passage, which corresponds, according to Fanny, to the closing of the Goethian interlude: “Clouds and mists are leaving / they become clear from above. / Leaf and reed the wind sways / everything is already blurred”.
That scherzo It was the lowest point of a brilliant performance of the Octet Mendelssohnian. Corina Belcea led a compact ensemble that mixed the violins of both quartets and gave the first viola and cello stands to the members of the Ébène. In it allegro moderato ma con fuoco initial, the Romanian violinist secured the most virtuosic passages that Mendelssohn wrote for his friend Eduard Ritz.
But the best came in the development when everything stops, in pianissimo, in the middle of a contrapuntal passage full of dissonances. And the syncopations of the excellent violas, both the French Marie Chilemme from the Ébène and the Polish Krzysztof Chorzelski from the Belcea, returned the direction to the music that was activated with a flow of sixteenth notes until the recapitulation.
He Octet by Mendelssohn is usually read as a sonorous evocation of the first part of the Splendor by Goethe. And the sound archaisms of walking They seem to refer to the scene in the cathedral. The two quartets chose here to show their most introverted profile and to extreme the chiaroscuros with another master class of the violas. But the best of his performance was heard in the presto finale whose arduous counterpoint was vehemently started by cellist Antoine Lederlin of Belcea.
The movement seems to have as a Faustian analogy the fight for Margaret’s soul. And Mendelssohn contrasts, in the middle of an admirable formal sonata-rondo edifice, a theme taken from the famous Hallelujah of The Messiahby Händel, faced with the memory of the main motif of the scherzo. Of course, the Handelian theme wins, but the eight instrumentalists of the two quartets turned that fight into something exciting.
The second part focused on another octet written by a teenage composer, but almost a century later. The Romanian George Enescu concluded his Octet for strings, op. 7, in 1900, when he was not yet 19 years old. A dense composition, about 45 minutes long, with four interconnected movements like a monumental sonata form that includes up to a dozen recognizable themes. The mold seems to come from Liszt and Berlioz, but Enescu updates it with post-romantic sounds close to Schönberg and touches of folklorism reminiscent of Bartók. Violinist Corina Belcea once again led the composition of her compatriot, but now the result was absolutely memorable. And she featured her quartet colleagues on the first viola and cello stands.
After the initial Très moderé, which functions as an exhibition, the Belcea and Ébène were involved in elevating the two central movements that functioned as development. He Très fougueuxwhich would be the scherzostarted with a tremendous explosion in unison to unfold in a brutal fugato and in a passage with an impressionistic tone seasoned by cascades of ascending and descending notes. Here the eight musicians functioned as a unitary organism in the imposing rosary of contrasts, superpositions and accelerations that Enescu has at his disposal. The slow movement, Slowlythen became a true musical oasis, threatened at the beginning by an inopportune mobile phone.
The transition to Mouvement de Valse bien rythmée, which closes the play, was another admirable moment. But his sonic construction was the best of the night. A kind of apotheosis of the waltz, two decades ahead of The waltz by Ravel, and recapitulates all the themes of the work with a rare diversity of musical patterns. The members of Belcea and Ébène not only knew how to connect them admirably, but also led them to a true final apotheosis.
But after so much demonic music, the concert had to end in paradise. And, after the insistence of the applause, Chorzelski, the Belcea violist, presented as a tip an arrangement for octet by the former Ébène cellist, Raphaël Merlin, from In Paradisethe final number of the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré. A beautiful culmination, which garnered a few seconds of necessary reflection before another barrage of applause.
National Center for Musical Diffusion 23/24. XXI Chamber Lyceum
Works by Mendelssohn & Enescu. Belcea Quartet & Ébène Quartet. National Auditorium. Chamber Room, May 23.
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