The next chamber music concert in the current series by Chamber-on-the-Mountain will feature the celebrated Arianna String Quartet (John McGrosso, Julia Sakharova, violins; Joanna Mendoza, viola; Kurt Baldwin, cello), and the equally accomplished pianist, Michele Levin.
The concert begins at 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, in Logan House, 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road, adjacent to the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts.
The program begins with a work for solo piano, Sebastian Bach’s “Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue in d-minor, BWV 903 (1717-23),” followed by Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet #2, “Intimate Pages” (1927).
After the intermission, the two modules of piano and string quartet will join forces to perform Johannes Brahms‘ “Piano Quintet In f-minor, Opus 34 (1864).”
The “Chromatic Fantasia & Fugue” was a hit while Bach was alive, and it’s reputation — still less its power — hasn’t diminished in the three centuries since it was composed.
To the contrary, always regarded as a masterpiece, its stature has increased to the point where its performance is now experienced as a religious rite. It sounds as if it would be devilishly hard to play — even Glenn Gould can’t make it sound easy.
Janáček’s two string quartets, written late in his life, have been steadily climbing the charts for the last 50 years, keeping pace with the rise in the overall popularity of his music. They are absolutely unique in their passionate melding of romanticism and modernism.
They are, along with those of Shostakovich, Bartók and Schoenberg, among the most significant works in the form from the 20th century, and a good deal more engaging than those other — more famous — works.
One cannot be detached, listening to them; one must be caught up in their emotional torrents, or walk away. Discovering them was one of the great events of my youth as a music lover.
Brahms’ only published piano quintet went through several transformations, reworkings, to reach its present form.
We still have an earlier incarnation of the work — the “Sonata for Two Pianos in f-minor, Opus 34b,” which began as a piano quintet that the composer destroyed before he published it — and it sounds to me as if he were using the sonata as a kind of storage unit for the musical ideas he would eventually weave together into the finished product that we now enjoy as Opus 34.
Not that there is anything unfinished about the sonata, or anything about it that doesn’t work. Indeed, it worked very well as a showpiece for the piano artistry of Brahms himself. But the “Quintet” is something he obviously wanted to do with the material, and it took him about a year to get around to it.
Admission to this concert is $25; advance reservations may be purchased on line at www.ChamberOnTheMountain.com.
— 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.