We have recently given some attention to the Molto Adagio from Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor, Opus 11. The deserved fame of this beautiful and tragic middle movement contrasts with the angular and tempestuous outer movements, which are as well-known as one might expect for a twentieth century American string quartet. That the Adagio should be such a cultural phenomenon in its own right testifies to this contrast; it can be no coincidence that the movement itself is in B Flat Minor, whose constituent notes are diametrically different from the quartet’s home key, producing a concomitant divergence of mood. The Adagio has something in common with Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, considered here previously, in that although it began life in quartet form it was later transplanted to full string orchestra, in order to explore the original material with a wider and richer palette of sounds. Like the Eighth Quartet though the Adagio remains at its most perfect in the raw and brutally intimate setting of the quartet rather than the more impersonal orchestral environment.

Another characteristic shared by the two works is that they are often described as “depressing”. It is not hard to see why; both are impressed with a deep solemnity and a profound tonal darkness. Yet it is not a description with which I am comfortable; it is one thing to call the Adagio sad or melancholic, which it undoubtedly is, but “depressing”, if taken in its verbal rather than merely adjectival sense, implies not just that the music exudes despair, but that it engenders like despair in the listener. This is certainly not my experience of it. The Adagio has gained popularity as a soundtrack to occasions of mourning, such as those following 9/11 and the Japanese earthquake last year. Why is it considered so suitable for such events? It surely cannot be to compound the gloom. It seems more likely that its true function is to try and make sense of suffering which is often described as unimaginable. Hence it takes music, the most powerful and expressive of all art forms, to imagine the suffering. Once this can be done the suffering can be understood, and thereafter the process of conquering it can begin. Far from being depressing, music such as the Adagio can, by offering some insight into the pain of others, be a source of hope and catharsis.

Certainly the pleasure of music such as the Adagio, imbued as it is with such depth of sorrow, can be exhausting, and there will be times when the listener prefers to stay at home rather than embark on the tiring emotional journey it demands. But those who undertake the journey, suitably equipped, can expect to be rewarded not with misery but with a joy made all the more poignant by the misery which preceded it. Genuinely depressing music is surely that which cheapens human experience and which would have benefited from never having been composed, but I’m not going to start on John Cage again.

Of course our odyssey is not as linear as it might have appeared from the previous post, punctuated as it is by a welcome diversion East for the Prokofiev Cello Sonata. Although I have made it my business to seek out and listen to the first movement of this work, I profess no great familiarity with it and do not feel qualified to comment on it in any real detail. However it is patently a great sonata and in Michael’s capable hands it will be an undoubted success. If it is anywhere near as good as last year’s Brahms sonata then it should succeed in occasioning uncharacteristic paroxysms of self-doubt in Rostropovich, should he be listening from his place in the Soviet equivalent of heaven.

Furthermore Dvorak’s American Quartet, the apogee of our journey, is technically Czech; but it is so powerfully evocative of the land from which it takes its name that it transcends its European roots to be a truly international work, echoing the composer’s own New World adventure from which this quartet and his ninth symphony sprang forth. The evocation comes from the manifold pentatonic melodies which constitute the quartet’s principal thematic materials, presented and developed in accordance with European classical tradition. Thus we have a first movement sonata built around two distinctive pentatonic subjects, redolent of Negro spirituals in their joyousness and purity. This is followed by a slow second movement in which luscious and lyrical melodic themes, spread over painfully beautiful close harmonies, are underscored by a persistent viola mantra, the campfire around which the other instruments sing their sensitive and haunting songs. The third movement alternates between a light scherzo and a rather darker trio, and involves the intricate development and distribution of no more than two or three melodic ideas between various combinations of instrument. Last of all is a breathlessly exciting finale which takes the story of the American dream all the way to the Western frontier. In this sense one can even see the American Quartet as a Westward journey itself, carrying the Mayflower of the quartet form to what must have seemed, at the time the work was composed and America was still expanding, like the very edge of the world.

It is however far more than a geographical progression which our programme undergoes. The contrast between the Emperor and the American could hardly be greater. The Emperor, with its deep sense of form and artistry, is the ultimate aristocratic quartet, celebrating the finery and majesty of the imperial court; conversely the American, filled top-full with the wordless stories of slaves and cowboys, is a quartet of the common man, a quartet of the heart rather than the head, a gorgeous and glorious hymn to the men who built the land of the free from scratch. It is a tale of the power of hope and the dignity of hard-won democracy, and we invite you to come and listen to it, and the rest of our musical pilgrimage, next week.

And so to autumn, a season of maturing blackberries, blushing leaves and Tyne Consort recitals. There is a real sense of progression to this year‘s programme, from the finery of the European imperial court, to the wild undiscovered spaces of the New World. The contrast could scarcely be greater; yet it is more a happy accident than a grand design. The journey begins with early Mozart, which by definition means young Mozart, very much child as well as prodigy. Fittingly, the E Flat quartet throbs with carefree youthful enthusiasm. Even its A Flat slow movement, positioned between confident, pulsating outer movements full of melodies the composer liked so much he happily re-used later in life, is calm and reassuring, lacking in cynicism. The whole quartet is the Mozart of the popular imagination: enormously likeable and with everything sounding exactly as it should.

The serious business of the first half is Haydn’s Emperor Quartet, a quartet of such distinction that it has its own name. Its name derives from the hymnal theme of the second movement, Haydn’s original dedication to Emperor Franz II, the last Holy Roman Emperor. Its seriousness lies in the ceremonial majesty of its melodic phrasing and the formality of its dimensions. It does not lack fun; however it is conscious of its own responsibility to provide the grand, sweeping Emperor’s hymn with a suitable context, and it does not disappoint. The most notable musical aspect of the three faster movements is how derivative they are of the quartet’s first bold melodic statement, with its heavy anacrusis driving towards a powerful C major chord. This theme permeates the whole quartet and undergoes a variety of transformations throughout, reappearing in a range of keys – from a rough, rustic drone in E Major in the first movement development, then cautious and mysterious in A Minor in the trio of the third movement, to the dark and intense C Minor chords which characterise the finale – each with its own characteristic mood. This monothematic approach, a long way from the standard sonata form of Mozart with its masculine and feminine subjects, could become tiring in the wrong hands, but Haydn’s skilful treatment of his melodic ideas makes each new expression of the theme sound fresh and novel, while ensuring the unity of the whole is maintained.

Against this the second movement variations sound a world away, but they succeed in showing an altogether softer side to imperial power. As with the other movements, Haydn succeeds emphatically in repeating an idea while keeping it interesting, and each successive variation adds a new layer of intrigue and complexity to the theme. But it is the powerful simplicity of the theme which makes the variations possible. Of course it is now well-known as the German national anthem (an irony perhaps, as it pre-dates the German state by several decades). Still, in the sparse, intimate setting of the string quartet, it emerges as a melody of surprising sensitivity, even vulnerability. The Emperor with no clothes, perhaps.

On Monday I attended Prom 51 at the Royal Albert Hall, and heard a terrific performance of Brahms’ First Symphony by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Preceding Brahms in the programme was the “World Premiere” of Volans’ Piano Concerto No.3. The word “premiere” strikes fear into the heart of any experienced concert patron; they are typically something to be endured between the works which everyone has come to hear. An accurate impression of Volans’ concerto can be ascertained from the programme notes. The music is described as “spare”, “bleak” and “edgy”, which casual observers could be forgiven for thinking are the only moods of which modern composition is capable. Predictably the composer “mistrusts the whole idea of ‘form’” (in addition, it would seem from the music, to “melody”, “harmony”, and other things which make music worth listening to). Most illuminating of all is the composer’s “anti-conceptual” compositional style; “in practice this means he has no idea what will happen to a piece until he starts it”. More fool the likes of Brahms, who to the best of our knowledge actually thought about what they were going to write before they wrote it.

Suffice it to say that alongside one of the giants of the symphonic canon, Volans’ “concerto” (presumably a composer who so “mistrusts” form would have conceived a less formal title) sounded rather pathetic. It shouldn’t be like this of course. Some classical premieres could genuinely be described as historic events: the epic premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and Fourth Piano Concerto in the same programme, the near-riotous enthusiasm which greeted Elgar’s First Symphony on its first performance, and the inaugural exhibition of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, in a Soviet Union besieged by the invading Nazis. Of course not every premiere can attain these standards. But there does remain a wider point about modern composition, the reputation of which suffers from the kind of racket heard at the Albert Hall on Monday. The nadir of post-modernist composition has passed; there is a new generation of composers who realise the cultural selfishness of failing to add to the stock of compositions which, like Brahms’ First, will stand the test of time. However such composers must hear Volans‘ tuneless noise, and the praise of his fellow conspirators such as the concerto’s soloist, and be tempted by the view that form and melody are relics, rather than the lifeblood of classical composition.

Of course this might just sound like an appendix to the John Cage rant, and there are obvious similarities (though at least 4’ 33” has the benefit of irony). And perhaps Proms audiences really do think form and melody are finished, and only go to see the premieres (there was some applause for the composer when he appeared on stage at the end, although this sounded like polite English applause lacking any genuine enthusiasm). However I would hazard that Volans’ Third Piano Concerto will not be played at the Proms a hundred years hence, which surely tells its own story.

Apparently something called the “Classic Brits” is to be televised on ITV this evening (technically ITV1, but the other ITV channels are so bereft of meaningful content that their existence is barely worth acknowledging). This represents a change from the usual “Classical” awards, which some wise executive has decided is too redolent of an elitist, disdainful art form for mainstream viewers. I would be fascinated to meet the person whose viewing intentions were influenced by this wordplay. Perhaps he is among us, this floating viewer who tunes in expecting something about vintage cars, only to discover a world previously denied to him by small-minded elitists with their unreasonable insistence on sitting still and listening for what are sometimes long periods without cutting to an ad break, clapping out the pulse or taking a ghoulish interest in the performers’ private lives.

Still if this were just a cosmetic change we could perhaps laugh it off. But it would appear from the trailers that the channel which axed The Bill for financial reasons, only to apply the largest part of its economies to the wages of the presenters of its breakfast show Bankbreak, has decided that a full hour of classical music is just too much of an advertising risk, and instead must be adulterated by musicals and Shirley Bassey. I have nothing against Les Miserables, and it might well be that classical aficionados are thrown the odd bone of a violin concerto, but the idea that our foremost commercial broadcaster cannot even muster one classical music programme a year without turning it into some kind of variety show is profoundly depressing. The most culture the erstwhile home of the South Bank Show can now manage is Popstar to Operastar. Is our nation so much of a backwater that there is no market for anything more than this? I really don’t think it is, but clearly ITV has very little faith in its audiences’ tastes, nor any impulse to think originally and challenge them. The result is that a single Proms season on the BBC manages to fit in more culture than we are likely to see on ITV this side of the twenty-second century, by which time it might finally have finished paying Simon Cowell‘s pension.

Some might argue that events like the Classic Brits help to introduce new audiences to classical music, by mixing the violin concertos with popular numbers. This might make sense if such newcomers had somewhere to go with their new-found interest, other than Sky Arts or back to Britain’s Got Talent. Also the way classical music is presented on mainstream television – as an alternative variety of pop, gleaming with shallow glamour – is not going to encourage anyone to make the leap from Nessun Dorma to the Ring Cycle. As such we must conclude that ITV’s lack of interest in the classical genre is genuine, which is a great sadness for the many exposed only to the conspiratorial lie that the classical world is grey and unwelcoming.

It was Tyne Consort’s great pleasure to give a recital at the Lit and Phil, or the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle in full, last autumn. It is a well-named place, resonating with a stylish antiquity which cannot fail to appeal to classical musicians who spend their time cherishing those things – musical works, buildings, civic institutions – which have survived their hazardous exodus from history. It is very clearly a product of the Enlightenment, in thought if not in strict chronology; it puts one in mind of coffee houses and the kind of unregulated spelling which prevailed before Dr. Johnson intervened. At the same time it is hard to avoid the thought that one of the Enlightenment’s principal bê tes noires, Edmund Burke, that great believer in tradition as the repository of the wisdom of the ages, would have felt as much at home there as Thomas Paine or, for that matter, Mozart.

Yet this fine library in the heart of Newcastle, housed in the characteristically classical architecture of the city, is a useful and practical participant in modernity rather than a mere source of nostalgia. It is, oddly enough full of books; a statement of the obvious perhaps, but when compared to its modern city library counterpart it becomes a statement of some significance. The Lit and Phil is what might be called a proper library, unencumbered by the modern distractions of technology and commerce which, fine though they are, are best appreciated in moderation, and a library seems like the ideal place to escape them, to lose oneself for a short while in learning and possibility. Furthermore, it is a library full of what might be described as proper books, with hard backs, lots of words and that slightly intimidating dusty austerity that most great things possess. However there is more to it than books; musicians can find in there an impressive catalogue of printed and recorded music. And then, right in the heart of the building, resides a recital room. At first glance it promises nothing remarkable, containing only a grand piano and a few equally grand paintings. But it is the perfect place for a string quartet recital, featuring a surprisingly sympathetic acoustic and just the right amount of space for an audience whose attentiveness more than compensates for its modest numbers. Needless to say we are looking forward to returning for another concert later this year.

The Lit and Phil is an independent institution which of course relies overwhelmingly on private patronage to survive. We hope to make some small contribution to its continuation when we next perform there. In the meantime we prevail upon no-one to make donations they cannot afford, but it goes without saying that this august place is a worthy recipient of anything you can give, and that your generosity would not be unappreciated. So if you want to prove that wise men are as easily parted from their money as fools, we invite you to follow the link below.

Of course not all modern “serious” music is like Cage. Among the more welcome musical developments of the modern era is minimalism, the repertoire of which we are currently exploring. The genealogy of minimalism is peculiarly contemporary in contrast to its predecessors which grew up in such institutions as the court and the church. The earliest examples of minimalism were conceived on the university campuses of the post-war generation, before the movement found its role as a rearguard against the advances of the tuneless post-modernism of Cage and Stockhausen. That such music has ceased to be fashionable owes much to the success of minimalism in rediscovering such pure and simple virtues as harmony and structure. For, seen in its proper place, minimalism is a reaction, and a very welcome one at that. It is recognisably modern but respectful of the lessons of the old masters rather than childishly rebellious against them, and most of the best twenty-first century art music acknowledges its influence.

It is to minimalism’s great credit that, although it was conceived in the sanitised environment of the academy, it has transcended its origins and developed into something with mass appeal in the hands of such skilled craftsmen as Glass and Nyman. The reasons for this are inherent in the music, which is essentially concerned with the art of repetition. The older classical composers used repetition as a way of stating again something which had already be said; it was a means to an end. With minimalism the repetitions, and the progressions which take place within and between them, are the whole point. Of course for repetitions to be musically rewarding the right themes are needed, and there is undoubtedly great facility in the minimalist masters’ presentation of harmony and texture. Texture in particular is crucial, allowing the accumulation of so many different motifs that the listener becomes mesmerised. The visual equivalent is of towers of spinning plates growing before an entranced observer; the higher the plates climb, the more impressive the achievement. Yet, paradoxically, within such complex textures great unity of sound is maintained as delicately-arranged cross-rhythms knit the various timbral strands together into one rich, cohesive tapestry. To borrow another visual metaphor, the effect is like a magic eye picture; the listener becomes aware of the distinction between the parts and the whole only by giving it his full concentration.

Such attributes make the minimalist form a particularly versatile one, capable of being carried to a variety of different settings. This is especially evident in the widespread use of minimalism in films, to which it is almost uniquely well-suited; because it is more concerned with atmosphere and mood than bold and brightly-coloured melodies, it easily assimilates with the visual, while its reliance on repetition makes it very easily tailored to on-screen events. Yet minimalism is equally at home in the concert hall as the cinema, and there is no reason why we might not choose to perform a minimalist quartet at some time in the future.

Many readers will know about the recent campaign to have John Cage’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence elevated to the top of the charts for Christmas, as a rebuke to the power of X Factor and following on from Rage Against the Machine’s number one last year. In the end the campaign was a fairly emphatic failure, but it did raise some interesting issues. It is surely a noble endeavour to protest against the X Factor, a miserable excuse for entertainment and an enemy of both good music and good television. And while the programme’s success was hardly diminished by last year’s festive setback, the idea of such an enterprise is useful as an elegant reminder that the X Factor leviathan it is not in fact omnipotent.

However it must be doubted that the feted Cage was the correct vehicle for this year’s protest. For the post-modernist, ultra-conceptual school from which the Cage is drawn is as much anathema to real music as the X Factor. Cage and his followers claim that 4’ 33” is musical essentially because it provides listeners with the opportunity to create their own image of the music, and reach some profound conclusions about the interaction of music, silence and everyday sound. However it is hard to see how such an outcome is in Cage‘s gift; everyone who lives in a tolerably quiet house can ponder on the distinction between hearing silence and listening to it every night of their lives. The idea that Cage has done something audaciously novel is surely mythological. Indeed 4’ 33” is devoid of intellectual as well as artistic value. It is not hard to imagine an indolent music student who, having realised with horror the imminence of his composition deadline, conceives some silent concoction reinforced by a flimsy commentary explaining why his submission really does constitute music. But pure silence is not music; anyone possessed with minimal intuition is aware of this, and no amount of semantic sophism can make it otherwise. Yet 4’ 33” is also anti-musical in the more profound and damaging sense that it turns the public away from serious music into the alluring embrace of X Factor hooks which, for all their faults, are capable of providing some transient entertainment. Supporters of Cage rightly argue that there is so much more to music, and life, than pop and the X Factor. Yet if the alternative is Cage, why should anyone believe this? Little wonder that if Cage is the best competition to the X Factor that “Classical” music can muster, large numbers of popular music fans stick to what they know, leaving the genuine and vast treasures of the real Classical world tragically under-discovered and under-appreciated.

In truth it is not clear why real music fans should care less who has the Christmas number one. But perhaps that is beside the point. By all means rage against the machine; but please, don’t use such blunt weapons as Cage’s hollow, lifeless hymn to academic self-indulgence.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2011 to all our followers.

Regular readers of this column, should they exist, will have noticed from elsewhere on our website that we have our Autumn Recital series of concerts coming up next month, occasions which everyone hopes will be suitably auspicious for all concerned. The details of those two concerts are available on our “November 2010” tab, but I mention them here for the reason that I intend this to be my last post at least until the concerts are over. Preparing for and promoting the concerts are substantial tasks which require and deserve as much attention as possible; time spent planning and writing these columns would necessarily distract from this. In any case it shall do us all no harm for the creative well to be replenished.

Most of the programme I have written about in previous posts. We open with the Telemann Viola Concerto; starting off with a solo might well be a daunting responsibility for me, but the piece has such a wonderful sun-coming-up feel to it that the beginning is its rightful place. In any case I shall be ably assisted by the ensemble. The Beethoven Romance is a sumptuous work for solo violin, occasionally tempestuous but in such a way that never threatens to defeat the prevailing mood of placid lyricism. I have no doubt Adam will do it justice. The Corelli Christmas Concerto is a staple of the early music repertoire – and of our concert programmes as well – and always a pleasure to play. The second half begins with the third Mozart quartet in G, one of the finest examples of the gentle perfection for which the composer is known. The latest item on the programme is the first movement of the Brahms Cello Sonata No.1, which I expect Michael to render with characteristic panache. The piece itself is one of those stirring nineteenth century works which somehow manages to convey a complete narrative in the space of a single opening movement, a dark and impassioned exposition progressing through an intense development to a gloriously serene conclusion. Although I am sure that the remaining movements are an equivalent delight, one is never conscious of being disadvantaged by only hearing one of them. The final item, as promised, is the Haydn Quartet in F Minor, Opus 20 No.5 , which like the Brahms starts from a troubled place but unlike it finds an altogether less satisfying – but no less emphatic – resolution at the end of a journey whose ultimate terminus remains uncertain until what is almost literally the bitter end.

One hopes however that our audience will be wholly without bitterness at the end of our concert season. These are great works which deserve a respectful hearing, but also a professional performance, which is what we aim to provide. To that end this column will remain dormant for the foreseeable future. It has been a great pleasure to produce it, and hopefully it will prove an even greater one to translate words into action in a few weeks time.

Last time we considered the early development of the symphony and the string quartet. The obvious difference between these two forms is that while the symphony orchestra has undergone manifold changes in the intervening centuries since Haydn was active, the quartet has continued to comprise the same four trusty instruments. Therefore the endurance of the string quartet has been, in a sense, far more meaningful than that of the symphony orchestra. What is the secret of the quartet’s success? Why has it survived when other formats of yesteryear, popular in their own time – one thinks for instance of the madrigal, the trio sonata and oratorio – have more or less fallen into disuse, though some determined souls doubtless continue to persist with them? Of course there are a variety of reasons, many cultural, many technological. However there are purely musical reasons as well, and it is worth briefly considering what these might be.

A critic recently remarked, in an interview with Philip Glass, how the quartet is particularly well-suited to intimacy and introspection. It is arguable that this has made it ideally placed to exploit the trend for more recent composers such as Debussy, Bartok and Shostakovich to use their works to convey moods of darkness and disturbance reflective of the often troubled and tumultuous times in which they lived. In the early days of the quartet it was not the fashion to write music to convey mood as such; however this began to change as the nineteenth century progressed, and the quartet was found to be sufficiently versatile to express Shostakovich’s powerful and painful cris de coeur as well as Mozart’s elegant exhibitionism. The timbral unity of the quartet is also significant; no other combination of four instruments could provide such an opportunity for the ensemble to sound as if it is speaking with one voice. One could of course make a quartet out of flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon, but harmonically the result would remain a mixture rather than a compound, with each constituent instrument remaining easily identifiable and the harmonic blend imperfect. Alternatively a quartet of four flutes or four clarinets would have a limited range. And, while the trained ear can tell apart a violin and a cello playing the same notes at the same pitch, they are timbrally far more similar than a flute and a bassoon.

These are just a few of the reasons why string quartets continue to be the staple for modern composers such as Glass, following in the august tradition established by Haydn. Perhaps this is to over-complicate though; I admit to bias, but string instruments are the most wonderful of all musical inventions, and the quartet configures them in the most beautifully simple way, that there is something for all composers to mould into their own creation. Of course the greatness of the string sound is primarily responsible for the success of the symphonic form as well, but that risks opening up a controversy which should be saved for another day.

The famous quartet the Lindsays once said that they started out believing that Haydn quartets existed to fill the gaps between Mozart and Beethoven, but then on getting to know them discovered that they were the works to which they kept returning and found most rewarding of all. This tendency to overlook arguably the most important composer of the classical canon is a curious phenomenon. For it is possible to attribute to Haydn the upbringing of the two most enduring classical forms: the symphony and the string quartet, built around his other great innovation, sonata form. Clearly Haydn was not the first to formulate music in a ternary order, but of the major composers he probably was the first to present a ternary structure as a harmonic journey, progressing to the dominant before returning home to the tonic. Even the traditional four movements of the symphony – allegro sonata, slow movement, minuet and trio and faster finale – can be traced back to this grand composer, the progenitor of so much that today’s listener takes for granted.

Why is Haydn’s centrality to the development of classical music, compared to his broad contemporaries Mozart and Beethoven, so neglected? For while Mozart perfected the symphony and the quartet, and Beethoven introduced to them new and hitherto unimagined possibilities, they both owed to Haydn a debt that is not always acknowledged. One possibility is that, because Haydn lived the longest of that illustrious trio, and had the least troubled personal life, no romantic biography has grown up around his music to inject it with greater contextual interest. Secondly there is a sense in which Haydn is seen as lacking the seriousness and dignity of those other giants of the classical era. However this is surely unfair; certainly Haydn wrote music of great warmth and humour, but it would be unjust were his whole output to be stereotyped by the unexpected fortissimo chord in the Surprise Symphony, or the gradual exodus of the orchestra in the Farewell Symphony. For Haydn was equally capable of music of great depth and sensitivity, as evinced by his Opus 20 No. 5 quartet in F Minor, which sits perfectly in its saturnine key. Its dark and mysterious first movement imposes a mood which continues throughout the minuet; this mood relents in the slow third movement, defined by its dreamy first violin descant, but returns with renewed purpose in the fugal finale, which resolves the questions the first movement asks, but not with the answers we necessarily want to hear.

There can be little doubt that Haydn deserves to be considered as an equal to Mozart and Beethoven, in terms of both the quality of his work and the value of his creativity to Western music. In our forthcoming concerts, which we intend to publicise soon on our website, we intend to finish our programme with Haydn’s Opus 20 No.5 quartet, after both Mozart and Beethoven have been played. One hopes that the Lindsays, as well as Haydn himself, would approve.

Widening the ambit of this column slightly to include music which – for obvious reasons – does not form part of Tyne Consort’s immediate repertoire, there was on television last week an archive performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto from a previous Proms season. The Emperor is the magnificent apotheosis of Beethoven’s five piano concertos which together have come to define the modern piano concerto as a vehicle of depth and complexity equal to the symphony. What I found particularly interesting about the television coverage though was the tendency to focus on the slow second movement as the real heart of the concerto. This was no aberration; the same tendency was apparent when the same piece was performed at a recent final of the Young Musician of the Year competition. Nor is it solely a BBC phenomenon; the Sage programme for the forthcoming year refers to the work’s “profoundly exquisite slow movement”, to the apparent exclusion of the outer movements (in fact this tendency is not even limited to the Emperor, being apparent also in treatment of the Fourth).

At the risk of setting up straw men here, I think the use of the word “profoundly” encapsulates a belief, widely held among students and critics of classical music, that music which makes less of an instant impression on the listener is necessarily of more intellectual value than more “accessible” music like the first movement of the Emperor, with its fairly persistent high tempo and plethora of memorable melodies. Certainly no-one would deny that the most intellectually rewarding music does not reveal all of its treasures on a first hearing; however this is quite different from arguing that the more voluminous treasures are always the best-concealed. It is akin to assuming that someone who looks plain must have a good brain. This dangerous stereotype leads to unmerited intellectual credit being given to music which is sometimes perversely abstruse, such as the atonal postmodernism which continues to prevail on university campuses at the expense of music which has the temerity to try to please the listener as well as challenge him. Of course the slow movement of the Emperor is very far from being atonal. But, having no illusions about my own intellectual deficiencies and therefore having nothing to lose, I am happy to say it: the foremost pleasure of the Emperor is the first movement, not the second. Furthermore it is an intellectual reward as well as a purely sensory one which accrues to the listener. In fact if anything it is the slow movement which could be described as a mere pleasant diversion, never threatening to disturb the memory of what went before.

No doubt it is taken for granted that in most classical forms faster movements tend to predominate. Wondering why this is may be understandable, but it is surely not simply because slower movements are harder to write. For as the Emperor Concerto aptly demonstrates there are serious intellectual riches to be mined from what is, put simply, fun music.

How to encapsulate Beethoven in 500 words? We can draw some inspiration from his fifteenth string quartet in A Minor. Although this is a work of symphonic breadth, it is succinct enough to give lie to the excessive focus on Beethoven’s gloom and melancholy at the expense of his music’s wider narrative of good prevailing over evil. Certainly the opening movement of the fifteenth quartet is one of Beethoven’s darkest opening movements, pervaded throughout by a deep – if expertly suppressed – sense of tragedy. Beyond this though the story is very different; the second movement comprises a gentle minuet and what must be one of the most wonderfully lyrical trios Beethoven ever committed to manuscript. The background to the epic third movement is the composer’s recovery from serious illness, the music rendering in exquisite detail this juxtaposition of suffering and convalescence; while it is certainly tainted by past loss it speaks primarily of hope. The fourth movement comprises a short, boisterous march and a connecting passage to a final movement which, although beginning with the same tragic tonality as the first, throbs with impatient purpose and a sense that resolution lies within reach; and, in what seems like no time at all, resolution arrives with a triumphant apotheosis in the major key. Far from being a tale of doom therefore the quartet – like the composer – is a multi-dimensional microcosm of the human condition.

How then to explain the view of Beethoven as a joyless purveyor of misery which has gained such wide currency? The composer’s tendency to front-load his minor-key movements does not help. While later composers – no doubt under Beethoven’s influence – have often ended minor-key works with major-key climaxes, most Baroque composers would be content with a Picardy third, while Mozart’s most famous works in minor keys (such as the fortieth symphony) usually end in the start key (Haydn meanwhile sometimes wrote last movements of major-key works in the minor key, as with some of the Opus 76 quartets). Beethoven then can be seen as a pioneer of the idea of working towards the light, but in a culture in which opening movements tend to be the most well-known many listeners may not stay around long enough to see it. However the traditional view also fits very well with the composer’s deafness. There can be no doubt that Beethoven was tortured by his failing hearing, especially as the failure was gradual and incomplete. This intermittency captures perfectly the idea of Beethoven as a man in constant battle; raging against the dying of the music and forever harbouring the hope that his deafness could one day be conquered, long after reason suggested otherwise.

It is this sense of struggle, and everlasting belief in the power of human spirit, which defines both Beethoven and his fifteenth quartet. Certainly his music plumbs the cruellest depths; however it also soars to the most blissful heights, and to miss this is to cut oneself off from the true meaning of a complex and magnificent composer.

It is no doubt widely known that, compared to that available to violinists, the repertoire of the solo viola player (how telling that there is no single-word noun for this species of musician) is somewhat attenuated. Violin-playing cynics might postulate that this is because their viola-playing counterparts cannot be trusted with the great works, and I have no wish to question their wisdom. A fairer explanation is probably that the range of the viola is better suited to ensemble music and is not flattered by the show-stopping demands of the violin concerto corpus. We do however have some gems, and one of these is Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G Major. Whether Telemann was moved to compose this work of glorious pastoral innocence by pity for the neglected viola player we cannot be sure. Hard-hearted though is the viola player who feels patronised by such a generous gift to his repertoire, for Telemann’s work comprises four movements of such simple pleasure that it is impossible to feel for it anything but the deepest goodwill.

There are several aspects to Telemann’s achievement, but it is worth considering briefly one of the less obvious ones, and that is key. Because the lesson of most Western music is that the listener should not get too attached to hearing something in any one key, because it will turn up in a completely different one soon enough, it might seem counter-intuitive that the composer’s choice of tonality can have any great bearing on musical outcomes. Yet the fact that we can identify composers as having a propensity to write in certain keys would suggest that tonality is far from arbitrary. Bach for instance had a fondness for B Minor, while Elgar’s liking for E Minor has retrospectively imbued that key with a distinctly English flavour. Beethoven meanwhile had keys for different occasions: C Minor (the “fist-shaking“ key) for works of drama and emotional intensity, E Flat Major (the “heroic” key) for moments of grandeur, and F Major for more relaxing occasions. Much of the delight to be obtained from Telemann’s Viola Concerto can be traced back to its G Major tonality. For G Major is a key of quiet confidence, a key which is at once undemonstrative and satisfyingly uncomplicated, like a loyal friend whose affection need not be expressly acknowledged, and as such literally goes without saying. In this sense it is perfectly suited for the viola, but in it the viola player also finds practical advantages: the fact that the lowest three strings of the viola represent the subdominant, the tonic and the dominant of G Major presents the viola player with the perfect opportunity to show off the sonorous beauty of his lower register with relative economy of effort.

It is no surprise then that Telemann’s Viola Concerto is so popular among viola players; it is a pleasure both to play and to listen to. And, as the cynical violinist might say, it is not as if we have much else to play.

One of our current projects is Shostakovich’s eighth quartet. Few members of the entire quartet repertoire have provoked such debate as this work of astonishing power blended with occasional moments of heart-breaking pathos. Written during the composer’s visit to Dresden after World War II, it comprises five contiguous movements which together evoke both the pitiful destruction of that conflict and the composer’s own thoughts of suicide at the time of writing in 1960. The quartet’s centrepiece is its second movement, a flurry of almost divine brutality which arguably stands as a kind of Holst’s Mars, the God of War for the nuclear age: inhuman, unrelenting, and total in its devastating force. The third and fourth movements can be seen as both fighting to escape the shadow of the second and zooming in from its panoramic horror to reveal its effects at closer proximity. The tragically distorted folk setting of the third speaks of cultures destroyed by what the composer himself described as “fascism and war”, while the fourth – which, with macabre irony, is both the most poignantly sad movement and the only one which spends any substantial time in a major key – consists of individual voices muted by war but made beautifully audible through music in a new, but comprehensible, heavenly language. These then give way to the final movement, a reprise of the bleak melancholy of the first corrupted by dissonant counterpoint and ending with a hopeless vision of death as the end of everything, the hints at salvation expressed in the previous movement now a distant memory.

Shostakovich’s eighth quartet should be viewed in the context of the composer’s turbulent relationship with the Soviet Union, justifiably one of the iconic stories of musical history. Shostakovich of course frequently fell victim to the Soviet regime’s quest for complete cultural control. However in the closing moments of this quartet we surely see an atheism of which the Communist hierarchy would have approved; there is certainly no suggestion of redemption or resolution in those mournful C minor chords. Interestingly in the first two movements we see the beginnings of a mass, with the serene Requiem of the first followed by the explosive Dies Irae of the second. In this sense the work resembles Britten’s War Requiem, composed at around the same time and informed by similar cultural influences. Tellingly though there is no equivalent in the Russian’s work to the Englishman’s Paradisum at the end of his; in Shostakovich’s world there is no delivery from evil or prospect of eternal life, something which can unsettle Western listeners so used to hearing stories of adversity overcome, as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Nonetheless for all its profanity Shostakovich’s eighth quartet is a profoundly moral work, and it is this which supplies it with so much of its impact. However a good story to tell is one thing; the ability to tell it is quite another, and we should be thankful that the eighth quartet is not only emotionally moving but also musically inspiring.

As a quartet we play a lot of Mozart. At the moment we are concentrating on the earlier quartets, although the later Eine Kleine Nachtmusik remains a staple of any string repertoire. Like no other aspect of the Mozart musical corpus – save perhaps for the operas – the quartets reveal the true genius of Mozart in that they sound exactly as music should. Imagine a string quartet and you imagine them playing Mozart, probably a minuet in a jolly major key on a pleasant summer’s evening. There is an almost extraterrestrial perfection to so much of Mozart’s music, something which is particularly evident in the iconic opening movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Listening to this is the musical equivalent of hearing a speech whose words are inspirational and chime exactly with what the listener would say were he capable of such articulacy. With Eine Kleine Nachtmusik this impression derives partly from Mozart’s unmatched mastery of sonata form, but it is primarily a melodic effect, whereby each bar flows from the previous one as if it were the only natural and possible successor. With such organic melodic precision no other composer can compete, not even Beethoven.

Why then can Mozart’s music fail to move and inspire us quite as much as that of some other composers lacking his melodic and structural genius, most notably Beethoven? It is fair to say that as a quartet we have rather less opportunity to play Beethoven in public; in general Beethoven’s quartets are harder to listen to than Mozart’s. Yet it is worth the extra effort both to play and to listen to Beethoven, as the rewards can be greater, and it is this which perhaps explains why Mozart’s magic can be frustrating. For it is arguable that Mozart’s perfection is of an almost scientific nature, bordering on perfectionism and even fastidiousness at times. Developing the speech analogy, it is as if the words are perfect but the oratory itself is somehow lacking conviction. It is harsh and a little misleading to suggest that Mozart’s music can sometimes sound like it has been written to order, but it is a suggestion not entirely without foundation. For the most part it is impossible to perceive in Mozart any emotional investment in his art – it is notable that Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, a work of joyful serenity, was written at a time of great difficulty for the composer towards the end of his life – which in turn inhibits any emotional response. With Beethoven however we see enough hints of his sometimes dark and complex personality to make the thrilling climaxes and triumphant resolutions for which his music is so famous all the more well-earned.

To be sure Mozart’s music is a wonderful gift, and it is far more important that a composer can observe nature’s rules of harmony, rhythm and structure than emote effectively. But it is perhaps the case that were Mozart’s music a little more illuminated by the composer’s personality its greatness would be even further enhanced.

Hello, my name is Matthew Smith and I am currently Tyne Consort’s resident viola player (and occasional violinist). From time to time I will use this space to write a few words (500, to be precise – you can count them if you like) on what we are doing at the moment, and my thoughts on some of the music that we play. The 500 words will be entirely my own view; I profess no expertise, and it might be that my fellow members of the ensemble use this space to cordially disagree with me and put forward their own opinions. Such variety of opinion would, I hope, be reflective of an ensemble whose members each bring different qualities to it, to the benefit of the whole. However my main hope is that you enjoy reading these occasional posts as much as I enjoy writing them. If having done so you feel like exploring the rest of the site, then so much the better.

On the 18th of February 2010 Tyne Consort will be part of a concert of Baroque repertoire at St. Paul’s Church, Jarrow.

Tyne Consort will be joined by South Tyneside Senior String Orchestra to perform two of twelve recently published concertos by Michael Christian Festing. The concert will begin at 7.15pm.

Tickets £5. Can be bought on the night, or reserved by emailing your name and ticket requirements to info@tyneconsort.co.uk.

Tyne Consort were priviledged to have a masterclass given by Louise Miliband of the London Symphony Orchestra on the 23rd and 24th of July. The two day course was mainly spent on the Beethoven String Quartet No. 15, which we have worked on since January.

The aim of the masterclass was to gain fresh ideas on our interpretation of the work, getting ever closer to a performace of it later this year.