A Seattle Chamber Music Society team of Artistic Director James Ehnes and Tessa Lark, violins; Joan DerHovsepian, viola; and Mark Kosower and Julie Albers, cellos (apologies to Tessa, hidden by the camera angle!) launches the ethereal 2nd theme of the 1st movement of Schubert's String Quintet in C, D. 956. [From the SCMS -- watch the whole movement on YouTube.]
I had intended to drop the complete movement into the post a ways down, but we should be hearing it right now, right? -- Ed.
SCHUBERT: String Quintet in C, D. 956:
[19:13; our "2nd theme" clip starts c1:41] Seattle Chamber Music Society: James Ehnes and Tessa Lark, violins; Joan DerHovsepian, viola; Mark Kosower and Julie Albers, cellos. Live performance from the final event of SCMS Summer Festival 2025, in Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall, Aug. 1, 2025 [Thanks for tracking down the performance date, Gemini!]
by Ken
Yes, yes, we have all kinds of projects in the works. Don't I know it! But while I try to work out the next step (of which there are about a half-dozen versionettes duking it out on my HD), I thought I would share some tantalizing free music found recently amid the avalanche in my e-mailbox: Schubert from Seattle (via the U.K.) and Mahler from Berlin.
Alas, my customary habit of shilly-shallying combined with stretchifying (the operative philosophy, as near as I can reckon it, seems to be something like: "Why keep on trying to do today what you just might be able to do tomorrow?") has caused what was meant to be a simple post not only to overflow its bounds but to run up against a hard deadline. In consequence, all we're going to attempt in this newly consecrated "Part 1" is the first half of the mandate.
As compensation of sorts, at the end of Part 1 there will be a Schubert bonus. So let's proceed with what we've already started --
(1) SCHUBERT FROM THE SEATTLE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY
Here's where the shilly-shallying comes up against the hard deadline. As I write, on Friday, the Seattle Chamber Music Society's Winter Festival 2026 starts tonight. This edition runs from January 23 to February 1, with two weeks of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday concerts, and can be attended live in Seattle's Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall or via the SCMS Virtual Concert Hall, either as single performances or by subscription. Which means that even if you happen to stumble upon this post almost the moment it's posted, you'll have to go into speed mode to catch opening night in either form. Sorry about that.
(In the Virtual Concert Hall instructions you'll see that individual-ticket purchases include not just a livestream "with a 24-hour plaback window," but later "on demand" availability: "On-demand links are emailed two weeks after each concert and available to watch until March 16, 2026." Maybe you can buy tickets even after the event, in time for the "on demand" availability?)
I should clarify at the outset that the wonderful SCMS promo clip didn't arrive directly in my e-mailbox. What found its way there came not from Seattle but from Bournemouth, as in the U.K., home ground of that grand publication devoted to all things string-instruments-related, The Strad. Which means, it occurs to me, that this gem has traveled across the ocean and back! Specifically, I received it as part of a recent item in The Strad News, one of the few things that finds its way on a regular basis into that godawful e-mail heap which I always open. Eventually.
The Strad News item about the impending SCMS Winter Festival 2026 included a watchable video link, which turned out to be the entire first movement, Allegro ma non troppo (all 19:13 of it!) of the Schubert C major String Quintet, in that live performance from closing night of SCMS's Summer Festival 2025. (As a reminder, you can watch it on YouTube.)
LIKELY YOUR EYE WAS CAUGHT . . .Do I have to tell you that music doesn't come much more glorious than the first movement of the Schubert C major Quintet? (And isn't it sumptuously played by the SCMS team?) Unless you consider the sublime Adagio with which Schubert follows it. It's a cliché to attach the word "sublime" to this Adagio, but let's dip into the SC archive, and you tell me how else to describe it.
. . . by the presence in the SCMS Schubert Quintet listing of the distinguished violinist James Ehnes. He has been SCMS's artistic director since 2012, and just last January The Strad Notes reported that he'd signed an eight-year contract extension, to run through 2032.
The announcement quoted James E. saying: "Seattle Chamber Music Society is truly my artistic home and I am honoured to continue our work together. There has been no greater pleasure in my career than having this opportunity to present the greatest music with the greatest artists for our wonderful audiences in Seattle and beyond."
SCHUBERT: String Quintet in C, D. 956:
[15:04] Josef Suk and Jiří Baxa, violins; Ladislav Černý, viola; Saša Večtomov and Josef Simandl, cellos. Praga, live performance from a concert honoring violist Černý, in Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum, Prague, Jan. 31, 1971
[11:27] Tátrai Quartet (Vilmos Tátrai and István Várkonyi, violins; György Konrád, viola; Ede Banda, 2nd cello); László Zilvásy, 1st cello. Hungaroton, recorded in Budapest c1965
[15:54] Melos Quartet Stuttgart (Wilhelm Melcher and Gerhard Voss, violins; Hermann Voss, viola; Peter Buck, cello); Mstislav Rostropovich, 2nd cello. DG, recorded in the Tonhalle, Zurich, September 1977
My goodness! I'm not sure there's much more to say, except maybe, again: My goodness!!!
One thing that might be worth an afternote is those wild pizzicatos erupting from the 2nd cello -- hardly something you might expect in a "sublime" adagio. Except that they're an important component of what creates that sublimeness. I know I've previously quoted the view of the eminent cellist Peter Wiley (of the Beaux Arts Trio 1987-98, and the Guarneri Quartet in 2001-09 (the final years, the only personnel change in its storied 35-year run). Peter W., who in his pre-Guarneri years made his fair share of Schubert Quintet guest appearances, expressed a strong preference for the 2nd cello part, which Schubert conceived not just as a generally lower-lying partner to the 1st part but as, effectively, an underpinning double bass. I don't recall whether he used the word "flamboyant" in connection with those pizzicatos, but that's what it sounded like he was talking about, and the way I recall his playing of it sounding. (You'll notice, among our performances, that in the Melos Quartet Stuttgart's D. 956, guest cellist Mstislav Rostropovich plays the 2nd part, wqhich I suspect was as much by his choice as anybody's. Notice too that in the noticeably quicker Tátrai performance, Tátrai cellist Ede Banda made the Wiley-ite choice of the 2nd cello part for himself.)
NOW YOU WANT TO HEAR THE WHOLE THING, RIGHT?
It's kind of naughty, but we've got that in the archive. Let's hear that, and then maybe I'll have a few words to say about the music and the performances. (This is disingenuous. Apologies! It's mostly already written, and what's already written is already more than a few words.)
As noted, these perfomances were sitting quietly in the SC archive. I can't recall whether these audio clips were made for posts that were actually posted (and so have been heard here before) or for one of the multitudes of post-projects that never made it to publication. I think it's an interesting assortment, though.
In case it isn't obvious, D. 956 isn't an easy piece to play, either technically or in terms of the concentration it requires. But it's my understanding that musicians love playing it, and it's not hard to hear why. What must it be like to be making this music happen? Isn't this what you spent all those years learning, practicing, and playing for? The piece challenges performers to play up to its level.
SCHUBERT: String Quintet in C, D. 956:
i. Allegro ma non troppo
ii. Adagio
iii. Scherzo: Presto (Trio: Andante sostenuto)
iv. Allegretto
[46:09, with applause; ii. at 14:15, iii. at 29:20, iv. at 37:10] Josef Suk and Jiří Baxa, violins; Ladislav Černý, viola; Saša Večtomov and Josef Simandl, cellos. Praga, live performance from a concert honoring violist Černý, in Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum, Prague, Jan. 31, 1971
[51:55; ii. at 19:44, iii. at 31:14, iv. at 42:44] Tátrai Quartet (Vilmos Tátrai and István Várkonyi, violins; György Konrád, viola; Ede Banda, 2nd cello); László Zilvásy, 1st cello. Hungaroton, recorded in Budapest c1965
[57:39; ii. at 20:34, iii. at 36:34, iv. at 47:51] Melos Quartet Stuttgart (Wilhelm Melcher and Gerhard Voss, violins; Hermann Voss, viola; Peter Buck, cello); Mstislav Rostropovich, 2nd cello. DG, recorded in the Tonhalle, Zurich, September 1977
Just from the timings, we know that our Czechs are odd men out (and yes, all 12 performers are men -- note the performance dates) with regard to the ginormous first-movement exposition repeat. Josef Suk & co. don't take it; our other teams do, and I think make us glad they did.
As to the performances, I can see that my fondness for both Czech and Hungarian chamber-music string players led me to our Czech and Hungarian entries. Shades of the Austro-Hungarian empire! Vienna may have been at the center, but it wasn't all that the old empire contained -- and this is the culture in which the great Classical masters were nurtured. Remembering the giant linguistic gap beteween Czechs (and Slovaks) and Hungarians, it's not at all obvious that they should have so much in common. While it didn't come out quite the same in Prague and Budapest (and their ethnic fellows beyond the capitals), with both there's often a special intensity, a kind of songful vibrance, in tone production and interpretive intensity, that gives me special pleasure.
That said, I'm not sure the Suk & co. first movement bears it out. (It's probably just as well that they didn't take the repeat!) Longtime readers may recall that Josef Suk is a special presence in my violinist pantheon, and from the sublime Adagio on -- well, oh my! We've heard a fair amount from the great Tátrai Quartet (I think if I could have only one recording of the complete Haydn string quartets it would be theirs). I love the earthiness of their playing.
As for our not-quite-mainstream "German" performance (with the special Russian guest), somehow when I think of the Melos Quartet Stuttgart, I think of seriously serious musicians, and their D. 956 certainly fits this description. The Quintet was completed just two months before Schubert died, two and a half months shy of his 32nd birthday. This was the period when he was also occupied with the great final trio of piano sonatas and the songs that were apparently connected in his head and wound up in the posthumous Schwanengesang (Swan Song) collection.
ABOUT THOSE FIRST TWO MOVEMENTS
Intending no disrespect to the dazzling Scherzo and finale, both utterly top-notch creations in their own right(s), they must have been created, whether consciously or not, to hold their own but without taking the spotlight of the first two movements, which come from a world otherwise inhabited at that point only in the late quartets and piano sonatas of Beethoven, which Schubert had studied so passionately that they became absorbed in his musical personality. And I always think, when I listen to either work, of the link, not just structural but spiritual, between D. 956 and the Bruckner Seventh Symphony.
I can't swear that Bruckner had the Schubert Quintet in his head as he was imagining the vast expanses of the Seventh's Allegro moderato and Adagio, the symphony's object reverence isn't so much the obvious composer, Wagner, but the musical forbear I think Bruckner hoped to prove himself worthy of, and pulled it off. (We spent a good amount of time pondering these two movements in the December 24 post "The question we're exploring: What good is a 'symphonic adagio' anyways? Like, what can one of 'em do for us? -- Part 1." (I don't think there was ever a Part II. I do see in my Blogger dashboard that there's some kind of draft with the same title. I don't have the heart to look at it, but I'm guessing it was supposed to develop into Part 2.)
I thought of pasting in the relevant portion of the 12/24/2024 post, but that seemed as if it would overburden this post. I have, however, ripped it out and plunked it into a post of its own: "Speaking of 'one-two punches' (well, we will be in a moment), what do you think -- is Schubert D. 956 lurking in the background?"
NOTE: I'm happy to see, btw, that Wikipedia has a really nice article on the Schubert Quintet. Is this another case of the piece exerting its power to lift people in its orbit to its level?
NOW FOR THAT PROMISED SCHUBERT BONUS --
Especially since we're currently involved in an attempt to demonstrate what I mean by "musical voices," which isn't any kind of newfangled analytical concept but simply the basic device with which composers assemble notes to communicate something to listeners, we might consider that no composer had a more vast or varied range of them at their disposal than Schubert. I thought we might listen to at least the first movement of his "other" quintet, a stupendous piece of almost totally different sorts.
SCHUBERT: Piano Quintet in A, D. 667: i. Allegro vivace
[9:07] Mieczyslaw Horszowski, piano; Budapest Quartet members (Joseph Roisman, violin; Boris Kroyt, viola; Mischa Schneider, cello); Julius Levine, double bass. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded July 8-11, 1962
[13:35] Rudolf Serkin, piano; Jaime Laredo, violin; Philipp Naegele, viola; Leslie Parnas, cello; Julius Levine, double bass. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded at Marlboro, Aug. 15, 1967
[12:47] Peter Serkin, piano; Alexander Schneider, violin; Michael Tree, viola; David Soyer, cello; Julius Levine, double bass. Vanguard, recorded in Vanguard Studio, 1965
Well, maybe we could slip in the whole Trout Quintet:
i. Allegro vivace
ii. Andante
iii. Scherzo: Presto
iv. Theme and Variations: Andante
v. Finale: Allegro giusto
[i. 8:37; ii. 6:46; iii. 3:54; iv. 7:35; v. 5:58] Boston Symphony Chamber Players: Richard Goode, piano (guest artist); Joseph Silverstein, violin; Burton Fine, viola; Jules Eskin, cello; Henry Portnoi, double bass. RCA, recorded in Symphony Hall, 1967-68
[i. 13:12; ii at 7:22; iii at 4:16; iv. at 7:20; v. at 10:16] Georges Plüdermacher, piano; Trio à cordes français (Gérard Jarry, violin; Serge Collot, viola; Michel Tournus, cello); Jacques Cazauran, double bass. EMI, recorded in the Salle Wagram, Paris, Apr. 17-19, 1974
IT'S TEMPTING, AT THIS POINT . . .
. . . since we're focusing on musical "voices," that unit of musical communication by which music sends whatever it's sending to listeners, to segue into the Theme and Variations movement of the Trout Quintet and how, like two other sets of variations Schubert concocted from songs of his, it evolved from the song "Die Forelle," a subject we played with not that long ago. But enough, sometimes, is enough, if not more. So --
WE'RE ADJOURNED TILL THE MAHLER HALF OF THIS POST
Coming soon. Really soon. I promise. (Fingers crossed.)
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