Wednesday’s Chamber IV program at Dock Street sported an up-and-down sequence of stark contrasts: two sunny, funny, and lighthearted numbers (host Geoff Nuttall called them “silly”) alternating with works of deepest profundity and solemnly soulful character. After welcoming the packed house to “the Mecca of chamber music,” Nuttall introduced us to the opening work: a piece from the latter category.
Surprisingly, that work was by Mozart: a composer whom we associate mostly with sunny grace and charm. But this piece — the String Quartet in D Minor, K. 421 — is an exception, noted for its minor-key drama and somber grief. It’s one of the famous cycles of six quartets that Mozart dedicated to his great friend and mentor, Josef Haydn (who, you will recall, invented the string quartet form). Then Nuttall and the rest of his trusty SLSQ sat down and proceeded to tear their audience’s collective heart out with it.
From the tense and distressed musings of the opening allegro and the wistful, despairing strains of the slow movement to the final set of edgy, gut-wrenching variations, no emotion of the serious or sadder sorts was left out. Even the minuet was surprisingly bleak and driven, for what’s supposed to be a lighthearted dance. Only the movement’s central trio section (a gentle country Ländler) offered some measure of fleeting relief. Hey, great music needn’t be happy all the time; life sure isn’t.
But the gloom and doom soon lifted with the next number, a wonderful bit of musical buffoonery: German composer Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. But wait, that’s a piece that he originally wrote as a substantial tone poem for HUGE orchestra. So, what gives? Well, a gentleman with the unlikely last name of Hasenöhrl (literally translated from the German as “little rabbit-ear”) condensed and rearranged it for five instruments, calling it a “grotesque musicale;” and that’s the version we heard here.
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