Lyrical exudation and wild attack

Jörg Widmann’s works do not suffer the fate of many other contemporary pieces, which are premiered with great fanfare – and then disappear into obscurity, do not become established in the listening memory and so on Repertoire can be. Widmann’s works are often guests on the concert programs, one reason for this was on display in the Boulez Hall on Wednesday: because they are finely crafted, funny, original and yet composed along a familiar aesthetic. The fact that the man born in 1973 deals so much with Beethoven naturally helps with orientation.

The New York Juilliard Quartet (Aretha Zhulla, Ronald Copes, Molly Carr, Astrid Schween) interpreted Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 130, with the post-composed Allegro Finale, and then compared this with Widmann’s Beethoven studies from 2019/2020, the 8th of which . and 10th string quartet. Zhulla leads with a mixture of discretion and conciseness, the shimmer of her first violin repeatedly laying brightly over the tutti, only to merge with it in the next moment. Your fellow musicians tease out the distinct colors of the voices, anticipate, sense the others, it’s pure listening pleasure. Beethoven, not played in an aggressively modern way, but almost romantically.

Of all things, variations!

Widmann’s examination of this quartet begins in wild unison attack, quickly culminating in a variation movement on Beethoven’s mysterious “alla danza tedesca” (“like a German dance”) theme. Variations, this traditional form, as we know, they were from Beethoven’s big thing, and Widmann wrote them in the Corona year 2020, almost yesterday, that alone is actually crazy.

But the work is also remarkable in terms of content, the tedesca theme becomes productive for Widmann, it sounds, as usual, once in its original form, then plucked, as glissandos like screams in the night, with a furious clawing paw, then only in the 1st . Violin, then only in the viola, finally expanding into width, virtually disappearing. But that’s not all the further development and appropriation of tradition, there follows another – yes, a Rondo! However, one that is difficult to recognize as such, as the well-known Rondo shape (ABACAD…) becomes blurred, and the A part also changes significantly.

Holy Thanksgiving

Widmann’s 10th String Quartet can be seen as a homage to the Cavatina, the 5th movement from Beethoven’s Op. 130. Exuding lyricism, the four instruments increase in intensity, at times it almost sounds like the “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Godhead,” which Beethoven composed in the String Quartet op. 132.

Finally, the “Great Fugue”, the original finale of op. 130, taken out by Beethoven under pressure from the publisher and published as his own opus: a radical late work, created without regard to listening habits and actually not a “great” fugue, but a sequence of thematically related individual fugues. Breathless, in shimmering concentration and full attack The Juilliard Quartet crowns a very interesting evening.