Taking our good old time withthe Gabrieli String Quartet

[STILL STITCHING THE THING TOGETHER, BUT THE MUSIC IS ALL IN PLACE (I THINK!)]

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: I'm still stitching, and have to pause the effort. As it turned out, there was more music added, but I think now it's all here. (Further consideration of Schubert's song "Death and the Maiden," which we hear here, will come in a separate post.

The Gabrieli Quartet of the era 1969-86: violinists Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, cellist Keith Harvey, and violist Ian Jewel, whom we heard last week playing the first and second movements of . . .

BRAHMS: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115:
ii. Adagio


Keith Puddy, clarinet; Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Classics for Pleasure-EMI, released 1970

by Ken

It was over the identification of the players in this recording, for the EMI-affiliated budget-price Classics for Pleasure label, that I got bogged down in last week's "Do I hear a clarinet?" In the Gabrieli's early recordings, strangely, the individual musicians weren't identified, and even in a CD reissue still weren't. As regular readers know, in this department we like to know who the people are who are performing for us.

For three-fourths of the early Gabrieli String Quartet there's no problem. From its founding, in 1966 or 1967 (we'll come back to this in a moment), until the departure of its founding first violinist two decades later, there was only one change of personnel: Sometime in 1969 the original second violinist, Claire Simpson, gave way to Brendan O'Reilly. I don't know when in 1969, but I do know, at least according to the original Classics for Pleasure LP label (which we saw last week), that the Brahms Clarinet Quintet recording was published (I still don't know when it was made) sometime in 1970, the year Classics for Pleasure was born. Was there time for Brendan O. to take his place with the quartet in time for the recording? Or might Claire S. still have been in place?

Admittedly, I further confused the point by mis-associating an entirely other young violin-playing Claire Simpson, who suffered a gruesome fate at the knife-wielding hands of a jealous ex-boyfriend, with the Gabrieli's second violinist. I thought I knew why Claire S. had left the Gabrieli; now I have no idea, just that according to Wikipedia a Simpson-to-O'Reilly succession happened sometime in 1969. However . . . .


A NEW CONFUSION ARISES IN MY GABRIELI TIMELINE

It surprised me that one of the Gabrieli Quartet's earliest recordings should have been a quintet with a clarinet soloist. Now it appears that before they recorded the Brahms quintet -- as much as three years before -- they had recorded the Mozart Clarinet Quintet, also with Keith Puddy. And now I realize that the association with Keith P. actually predates the formation of the Gabrieli String Quartet. In a 2003 interview for the Internet Cello Society, Keith Harvey, speaking of his time as principal cello with the English Chamber Orchestra (after some five years as the very young principal cello of the London Philharmonic) recalled:

During my time in the English Chamber Orchestra, the co-leader Kenneth Sillito and I, together with the pianist John Streets and clarinettist Keith Puddy, formed the Gabrieli Ensemble, which later became the Gabrieli String Quartet. In the Ensemble, we performed Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time at least two hundred times. The composer was present at one of these performances and wrote a glowing appreciation.

Let's leave for another the alarming image of four people performing the Quartet for the End of Time, in a fairly short span of time, 200-plus times. (It's not a terribly long piece, really, but in performance it always seems to me to last for two or three weeks. It amazes me that a piece can be simultaneously so tedious and so repulsive.) So Keith P. was already partnering with Kenneth S. and Keith H. before there even was a Gabrieli String Quartet!

A theory about the quartet's origin date: Maybe 1966 is when the oddly configured quartet calling itself the Gabrieli Ensemble was born in 1966, and 1967 the Gabrieli String Quartet in 1967. Of course this doesn't leave an awful lot of time for those 200-plus performances of the Quartet for the End of Time. So all we can say for sure is that somewhere in there the transformation took place. And in any case, it's interesting that the year 1967 should have popped up. Because --


LET'S GET BACK TO THE MOZART CLARINET QUINTET

MOZART: Clarinet Quintet in A, K. 581:
ii. Larghetto

Hold everything! You mean the Mozart quintet was published in 1967? Three years before the Brahms? And, presumably, in the first year or so of the Gabrieli String Quartet's existence?


Keith Puddy, clarinet; Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Claire Simpson [? (if 1967)], violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). EMI, released 1967 [? (per CfP LP label)]

That confounded label raises yet another issue. It's clearly from a Classics for Pleasure release, but as far as I know Classics for Pleasure didn't launch, as a "sub-label" of Music for Pleasure, until 1970. So is this in fact a reissue of a recording that had been made in time to be published in 1967? It's always possible that the label info is a misprint. (If so, it's also wrong on Side 2, which contains the finale of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet and the whole of the Mozart Oboe Quartet.) But it is also possible that producer John Boyden -- who seems, by the way, to have been quite a character -- did make the recording in 1967. The Wikipedia article on him tells us: "Boyden had joined Paul Hamlyn's Music for Pleasure label by 1967, a joint venture with EMI and that sold its repackaged recordings. He created Classics for Pleasure as a sub-label in 1970 and sold 4 million copies in the following 4 years."

What interests me here is that if the Mozart quintet was indeed recorded this much earlier than the Brahms, it was made in the first or at most second year of the quartet's existence. And the reason I find it so interesting is that especially from the time of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet recording -- published in 1970, you'll recall, the quartet can be heard playing with such ensemble confidence and balanced beauty of sound.

Let's listen to some more of the group's recordings from their Classics for Pleasure era. What we're going to be hearing is more slow movements -- three of them now, each in its own way among the most beautiful things ever written, starting with the haunting second movement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet. Slow movements obviously aren't the only test of quartet-playing, but it's a big one, testing ensemble coherence and yet individuality of expression, and the sensitivity and musicality of that expression. In these slow movements, there's no place to hide.

SO THIS QUARTET, CALLED "DEATH AND THE MAIDEN," IS ABOUT DEATH AND A MAIDEN?

Not exactly. The quartet, written c1824, came to be so known because of this haunting variations movement, the quartet's second movement, marked Andante con moto, which takes off from one of Schubert's most memorable songs, written some seven years earlier, and even published, in 1821, as the composer's Op. 7, No. 3.

Be careful setting your playback volume. The piano part plays a whole lot softer than the vocal part sings.

SCHUBERT: "Der Tod und das Mädchen" ("Death and the Maiden"), D. 531

Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; Graham Johnson, piano. From Vol. 11 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition, recorded June 7-10, 1990

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. DG, recorded in UFA-Ton-Studio, Berlin, Feb.-Mar. 1969

Renée Fleming, soprano; Christoph Eschenbach, piano. London, recorded in Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Mass., June 2-6, 1996

SCHUBERT: String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810
(Death and the Maiden): ii. Andante con moto


Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Classics for Pleasure-EMI, released 1971

DVOŘÁK: String Quartet No. 12 in F, Op. 96 (American):
ii. Lento


Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Classics for Pleasure-EMI, recorded January 1973

BORODIN: String Quartet No. 2 in D:
iii. Notturno: Andante


Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Classics for Pleasure-EMI, recorded January 1973


IN TIME, THE GABRIELI "GRADUATED" TO "REGULAR" LABELS

In an interesting variety of repertory. In the case of the Haydn Lark Quartet, I've broken the rule -- well, it's my rule -- of "slow movements only." What happened was, I went ahead and made a clip of the Adagio cantabile, then paused, reminding myself that the opening movement of the Lark is one of my favoritest pieces of music in the whole world, and couldn't resist going back in and making a clip of it too, and decided what the heck?, why can't we have both, just this once? It's my rules, remember.

WANNA HEAR SOMETHING FUNNY? (HA HA!)

A ways back in time, I remembered, I did a whole post about "lark music," focusing on three specimens: the opening movement of Haydn's Lark Quartet, Fenton's gorgeous aria "Horch, die Lerche singt im Hain" from Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor, and Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. I couldn't find it in the era of the stand-alone Sunday Classics blog, then rolled up my sleeves and dived into the Down with Tyranny archive, and much to my surprise, I found it! "Sunday Classics: Who can resist the 'elaborate' and 'extravagant' song of the high-flying lark?," from August 2009.

Only, there's no music! (Which kind of defeats the point.) That was before I figured out how to make my own audio clips, and the only way I could incorporate music was in "found" form, meaning clips from the YouTube of yore -- and none of the YouTube clips came up! (I was pleased to see that the images of two larks, the skylark and the shore lark, did come up.) I tried an editorial trick: copying the HTML code into a text file and replacing all the "http"s with "https"es. Not only didn't it work, but -- as usually happens when I try to edit one of those old file -- I lost all the line breaks! It occurred to me, though, that since I had the external text file, I could manually reinsert all the damned missing line breaks, or at least as many as I could catch in the welter of code. So the thing might still be readable, if not listenable. And the two larks are still on view.

I'm tempted to try to rehab that post. It's so damned much work, and to what purpose? Plus, I would probably have to read what I wrote, which I always dread. Still, I love those three pieces so much, and it would be nice to make batches of proper audio clips for all three pieces. Hmmm.

HAYDN: String Quartet in D, Op. 64, No. 5 (The Lark):
i. Allegro moderato
ii. Adagio cantabile


Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Chandos, recorded in The Maltings, Snape (Surrey), England, Feb. 13-15, 1986

TCHAIKOVSKY: String Quartet No. 1 in D, Op. 11:
ii. Andante cantabile


Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Decca, recorded in Kingsway Hall, London, May 20-21, 1976

ELGAR: String Quartet in E minor, Op. 83:
ii. Piacevole (Poco andante)


Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Chandos, recorded in The Maltings, Snape (Suffolk), England, Feb. 14-15, 1986


WHAT ABOUT KENNETH SILLITO ON HIS OWN?

In the many capacities of Kenneth S.'s long and busy career, which in addition to his two-decade-long leadership of the Gabrieli Quartet has included stints as concertmaster of the English Chamber Orchestra and a long association with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (including a substantial tenure as artistic director and director and concertmaster of the Academy Chamber Ensemble, he's made zillions of records -- in all sorts of roles.

For one thing, in the Gabrieli Quartet's Classics for Pleasure era, he was the soloist in a lovely recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons with the Virtuosi of England under Arthur Davison.

VIVALDI: The Four Seasons, Op. 8, Nos. 1-4:
No. 3 in F, Autumn:
i. Allegro
ii. Adagio molto [at 4:58]
iii. Allegro: The Hunt [at 7:52]


Kenneth Sillito, violin; Virtuosi of England, Arthur Davison, cond. Classics for Pleasure-EMI, recorded in Conwey Hall, London, November 1972

For another thing, here he is as a regular-type concerto soloist. Sticking to our "slow-movement theme," here's the central movement of Vaughan Williams' Concerto Accademico of 1924-25 (which he later preferred to have called just "Concerto for Violin and Strings"), which a publisher's blurb says "seamlessly combines references to the baroque style with Vaughan Williams's own distinctive vein of pastoral violin writing."

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Violin Concerto in D minor, "Concerto Accademico":
ii. Adagio - Tranquillo


Kenneth Sillito, violin; London Symphony Orchestra, Bryden Thomson, cond. Chandos, recorded in the Church of St. Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead, London, Mar. 15, 1988

And for yet one more thing, our man served as Sherlock Holmes's violinistic alter-ego in composer-conductor Patrick Gowers's soundtrack music for Granada TV's 1984-94 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (that's the series with Jeremy Brett in the title role).

"221B Baker Street" (opening theme)