This year, beginning in December, the Chiara Quartet will undertake our first Beethoven cycle. This comes a year or two before we had planned to do it, but we were offered the chance by Music in Deerfield in Massachusetts, and a quick survey of our repertoire proved that it would be more than possible, as we already have more than half of the quartets solidly in our repertoire. After little juggling of logistics, we committed to 3 concerts this season, starting in December, and 3 next season. We will also be performing the complete cycle in Cambridge, MA at Harvard, and in Lincoln, Nebraska as part of our inaugural Chiara String Quartet concert series at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Once we had the dates in place, the first big question is what order to play them in. Our ordering is as follows:
Concert 1:
Op. 135 in F Major
Op. 18 No. 4 in C Minor
Op. 59 No. 1 in F Major
Concert 2:
Op. 18 No. 3 in D Major
Op. 132 in A Minor
Op. 59 No. 3 in C Major
Concert 3:
Op. 18 No. 1 in F Major
Op. 95 in F Minor
Op. 127 in E Flat Major
and the following season:
Concert 4:
Op. 18 No. 5 in A Major
Op. 59 No. 2 in E Minor
Op. 130 (with revised finale) in B Flat Major
Concert 5:
Op. 74 in E Flat Major
Op. 18 No. 2 in G Major
Op. 131 in C Sharp Minor
Concert 6:
Op. 18 No. 6 in B Flat Major
Op. 130 (with Grosse Fuge) in B Flat Major
There are several obvious choices going on in this ordering. First is that most concerts contain a quartet from each of the three periods of Beethoven's life. A late quartet sits in every possible concert slot, as does a middle quartet. We will play Op. 130 twice in its entirety with the two possible finales, and the entire cycle ends with the Grosse Fuge. Putting together this order also splits up the pieces we don't yet have in our repertoire between the two seasons. Most concerts mix up major and minor keys as well.
How, you might ask, does one prepare for such a collosal undertaking?
The majority of our preparation for this cycle predates the initial request for us to play one. We've been a full-time professional quartet since 2000, and so this will coincide with our 10th season. Individually, we've played a ton of chamber music, and a lot of Beethoven as part of that.
I first heard a Beethoven cycle live when I was 10 years old, and the Juilliard Quartet performed one at the Wharton Center in East Lansing, Michigan. I had only been playing the cello for 3 years, and so my memory consists of the opening chords of Op. 127, and the hairy legs of the quartet members peeping out between their socks and tuxedo pantlegs. What? I was 10 years old, give me a break. If you haven't heard the Op. 127, its opening is one of the most memorable things Beethoven wrote, so you must come hear us play it live in our final concert this spring. Becca's father was in the Concord Quartet and she literally grew up listening to live Beethoven cycles.
One of the first quartets I played in the "Shürtzaut" quartet (a group of 4 13-year old boys who refused to tuck in their shirts) was the second movement of Op. 18 No. 4, and this was one of the pieces that I played under the coaching of Rostislav Dubinsky of Borodin Quartet fame the following year in his Quadro-quartet at IU String Academy. When the Chiara Quartet was formed at Musicorda in 1993, we played Op. 95 and had a chance to play the second movement with Arnold Steinhardt in his masterclass when our original violinist Rachel was sick. The following year, we coached Op. 59 No. 2 very intensely with Norman Fischer of Concord Quartet fame (and soon to be my teacher at Rice University). That same year, a group of students decided to practice the late quartets for a week and then to read through them. While at Rice, Jonah and I learned Op. 59 No. 1 with Paul Katz of Cleveland Quartet fame as our coach. At Tanglewood in 1999, I played Op. 127 with a group that coached with both Robert Mann and Raphael Hillyer of Juilliard Quartet fame, and this was one of the pieces with which the Chiara Quartet made our Alice Tully debut in 2005. Op. 59 No. 3 was one of the pieces with which we made our Carnegie Hall debut the following year, and one of the pieces that helped us win a prize at the Borciani Competition the same year. Op. 18 No. 3 was one of the pieces we played in the year we won first at the Fischoff Competition. While graduate students at Juilliard, Jonah, Becca, Anna Elashvili and I played the Op. 130 with the Grosse Fuge on her graduation recital after coaching with Robert Mann.
Even with a list this long, the preparation for a cycle is more than just learning the quartets. I played all of the sonatas and variations for cello in 2000 in New York (and will repeat the performance of all the sonatas this year). Julie, Noori and I have been listening to Richard Goode's recording of all the piano sonatas, and in my orchestral days, I played all of the symphonies except for Number 8. We've read biographies of Beethoven, looked at actual manuscripts at Beethovenhaus in Bonn as well as facsimiles online, and heard cycle recordings by the Juilliard, Emerson, Takacs, and many recordings by the Concord, Cleveland, Tokyo as well as performances by Brentano, Borromeo, Biava, Miro, Pacifica and other quartets I'm sure I'm forgetting, as well as student performances of many of the works.
We are extremely excited to embark on this monumental journey and hope that you will join us in the first performance at Harvard on Wednesday, December 2 in Paine Hall, or at Smith College in Northampton on Saturday December 5 in Sweeney Concert Hall on the Music in Deerfield chamber music series. If you're in Nebraska, you can hear us threepeat the performance on Sunday, December 13 in the Sheldon Art Gallery at 7:30 PM
