The Community Arts Music Association (CAMA) continues its Masterseries at the Lobero concerts at 8 p.m. Monday, with a recital by Germany’s Tetzlaff-Vogt Duo (Christian Tetzlaff on violin and Lars Vogt on piano) at the Lobero Theatre.
The Tetzlaff-Vogt program will consist of Wolfgang Mozart’s Violin-Piano Sonata No.32 in Bb-Major, K.454 (1784); Béla Bartók’s Sonata No.1 for Violin and Piano, Sz.75, BB84 (1921); Anton Webern’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, Opus 7 (1910); and Johannes Brahms’ Violin-Piano Sonata No.3 in d-minor, Opus 108 (1887).
The concert thus begins at the end of the 18th century (Mozart) and ends at the close of the 19th century (Brahms), and in between, two examples of the early 20th century version of “Modernism.”
The reason I capitalized “Modernism” and enclosed it within quotation marks is that all works of art are modern at the time they are made. The word itself comes to us from Latin via Middle French. The Latin word “modo” simply means “just now,” and the French “moderne” means “of the present day.”
Since the period 1880-1930, however, we have come to restrict application of the word “Modern” to a set of parallel movements in the arts — in literature, music, painting, sculpture or architecture — which assumed, apparently for all time, the mantel of modernity, and promoted themselves rather aggressively.
This self-conscious “Modernism” has come to be associated, in the minds of us members of the general public concerned with such things — readers, music lovers, etc. — with “difficulty.”
In this sense, then, both Bartók and Webern are “Modern” composers, although it is hard to imagine two composers who sound less like each other, and both of their works are separated from us by a hundred years, plus or minus five.
Bartók’s music often sounds like the music that went before it, the music that made us music lovers, only he seems to have misplaced his glasses when he was writing it down, and put a good many notes in the wrong place.
Webern, on the other hand, seems to have left out most of the music in each piece, as if each note were costing him a hundred dollars. Of the second Viennese triumvirate, he comes in a distant third in my affections (I love Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), but all the musicians I know much prefer him to the other two.
Nevertheless, I ventured to predict that we will find the Four Pieces much easier to sit through than the Bartók Sonata. Close your eyes and think of Brahms.
Single tickets to the Tetzlaff-Vogt Duo are $39 and $49, and they’re available at the Lobero box office, 33 E. Canon Perdido and by phone at 805.963.0761, or click here to purchase tickets online.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.