What's the Joke?
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
What’s the joke in Haydn’s String Quartet, opus 33/2, A.K.A “The Joke”? Having bet that the women in the audience would start talking before the piece ended...
Franz Joseph Haydn, who couldn’t resist a good musical joke when he thought of one, composed a finale for the Quartet in E-flat that kept sounding like it had ended. You hear the end of a theme. It repeats. Seems to get the hiccups. Was that the end? Nope. Another pause—another hiccup. Ah, now the theme is really going to advance—but no, that’s it! The End. The Emerson String Quartet has lots of fun with this one, and so will you. An “authentic instruments” version of Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp heads us toward our second hour, when we’ll hear pianist John Ogden perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2. Another sonata soon follows, with Mstislav Rostropovich and Rudolf Serkin bringing us an incomparable reading of Brahms’s second for cello and piano.
Malcolm Forsyth wrote “Electra Rising,” his cello concerto, for his daughter Amanda, the cellist who plays it for us this evening, along with the Edmonton Symphony under Grzegorz Nowak. Forsyth says that there are no Freudian connections, and that “the work fits her like a glove.” The poems of W. B. Yeats that John Tavener has chosen to set in his “To a Child Dancing in the Wind” portray not only the happy innocence of childhood but also the sense of a gradual loss of all that’s beautiful. Soprano Patricia Rozario is supported by flutist Kathryn Lukas, violist Stephen Tees, and harpist Helen Tunstall. As the evening ends, we hear Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig” in a remarkable performance by bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, followed by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s “Le roi des aulne,” a work for solo violin based on the “Erlkonig” themes, with soloist Leila Josefowicz.
Franz Joseph Haydn, who couldn’t resist a good musical joke when he thought of one, composed a finale for the Quartet in E-flat that kept sounding like it had ended. You hear the end of a theme. It repeats. Seems to get the hiccups. Was that the end? Nope. Another pause—another hiccup. Ah, now the theme is really going to advance—but no, that’s it! The End. The Emerson String Quartet has lots of fun with this one, and so will you. An “authentic instruments” version of Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp heads us toward our second hour, when we’ll hear pianist John Ogden perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2. Another sonata soon follows, with Mstislav Rostropovich and Rudolf Serkin bringing us an incomparable reading of Brahms’s second for cello and piano.
Malcolm Forsyth wrote “Electra Rising,” his cello concerto, for his daughter Amanda, the cellist who plays it for us this evening, along with the Edmonton Symphony under Grzegorz Nowak. Forsyth says that there are no Freudian connections, and that “the work fits her like a glove.” The poems of W. B. Yeats that John Tavener has chosen to set in his “To a Child Dancing in the Wind” portray not only the happy innocence of childhood but also the sense of a gradual loss of all that’s beautiful. Soprano Patricia Rozario is supported by flutist Kathryn Lukas, violist Stephen Tees, and harpist Helen Tunstall. As the evening ends, we hear Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig” in a remarkable performance by bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, followed by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s “Le roi des aulne,” a work for solo violin based on the “Erlkonig” themes, with soloist Leila Josefowicz.
