20th Century Russian and Hungarian Chamber Music at the Philharmonic

It's been another tough day, although there were a few nice calls with colleagues, and the weather is also quite chilly again.

In the evening I went with Ge. to the store and we split up: he bought the proper food, and I bought three round containers of ice cream to share with the family (not eat all by myself!).

Last evening the family attended a concert (thanks to T.'s generosity) at the Philharmonie building in Berlin's city centre. The Großer Saal (Great Hall) was hosting a concert at the same time, and a large stream of people was walking toward it and crowding the foyer, while the Kammermusiksaal (Chamber Music Hall) was more modestly busy. It was something we were doing in honour of Papa's would-have-been-70th birthday.

The programme: Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Béla Bartók. Scene: Geometrically patterned parquet of the stage, blue lighting, shadows of the chairs and the musicians projected abstractly onto the floor. White swathes of seating, as always. Spotlights, microphones, and what look like curling caterpillars hanging from the ceiling, as always. Lower rings of seats full, upper one partly empty. Four musicians in black suits and black pointy dress shoes polished so brightly that they glittered in the lights; music stands with scores for the viola and cello players, tablets for the first and second violinists.

Both Uncle Pu and I felt that Prokofiev's quartet suggested the countryside (for me, muddy fields, sagging wooden fences, a plodding beast of burden and a wagon and a farmer driving them). Shostakovich, he felt was revealed as the far superior composer, with more sophistication and artistic freedom. Bartók came after the intermission.

I agreed that it might make sense for the music to be edgier, too, and I was missing the raw emotion. Although raw emotion is not often the point of chamber music and besides the cellist was already adding roughness and friction from time to time. I was wondering if for example Mendelssohn's music might suit their style? T. or Uncle Pu argued that maybe it's for the best that we live in times where we can play music more mildly, without the grimness of the generation that lived through dictatorships and World War II.

In the family's professional's view, the 1st violinist did experiment with lots of musical ideas; but his violin was not quite the right one that would help them come across.

To go on to broader matters of audience enjoyment and world political context:

The appreciative audience rewarded the quartet with much clapping and whistling.

As the musicians came out from the mysterious room backstage after the curtain call and sat down for the encore, the second violinist told us (in German with an English quotation) that, as they travel, the quartet is often asked 1. 'Are y'all a band?' and 2. 'Where do you come from?' — The answer to #2 is Ukraine and Belarus. He acknowledged the ongoing war. (I can't tell apart Polish, Ukrainian, and other languages, but at any rate one/some of those languages was/were being spoken as we were later walking out of the hall onto Hans Scharoun's M. C. Escher-esque flights of carpeted stairs, so maybe there were Ukrainians and Belarusians in the audience too.) — The encore: a chamber music arrangement of a Melody by Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk.