The Ladies’ Morning Musical Club resumed its international concerts on Sunday with the arrival of the Cremona Quartet in a program ideally suited to the formula of concerts without an intermission and fittingly fitting, like an unexpected aperitif a few days before the Bach Festival. But the interpretation of The art of running away by this Italian set leaves a strange taste.
For this work, on which he worked for the last ten years of his life, Bach never defined the instrumental destination. We naturally thought of the keyboard. But which keyboard? Harpsichord, organ or clavichord, or even nascent pianoforte? And why not a consort of violas, therefore, potentially, a quartet, or even an orchestra, obsession with the conductor of the 1950s Hermann Scherchen?
Rhetoric and narration
A pioneer of the Baroque revival, Gustav Leonhardt fought hard to have the harpsichord thesis accredited. But whatever the instrumental truth and the mode of expression, The art of running away is such a masterpiece that the challenge is to “make it speak” to the mind and the heart.
Such is already a first achievement since some, in history, thought that it was simply a rhetorical work not intended for the concert. The most convincing performers, including two recent pianists (Filippo Gorini and Daniil Trifonov) have shown that the fascination exerted by The art of running away comes from a kind of hypnosis of the listener in front of the complexity of the matter. By gaining the concentration of the music lover, a narrative scenario can almost be put in place.
We experienced this process on record with the Emerson Quartet, notably thanks to the absolute balance within this group. The Cremona Quartet breaks with these attempts in an approach that seems a priori very learned. The 2e violin and violist each have two instruments, the most “spectacular” being a “tenor alto”, which sits between the viola and the cello.
The thing makes it possible to avoid transpositions and to change the colors. As with the Emersons, the configurations vary: sometimes we hear a trio, sometimes a duo. But as if that weren’t enough, the violist occasionally pulls out a recorder. But what, precisely, is the musical narrative discourse of these changes?
By scratching off the varnish of these contributions which seem so thoughtful, we do not achieve anything constructive. What do the variations of textures, the changes of instruments in the continuum and the follow-up of Bach’s thought bring? The answer is relentless: distraction instead of concentration.
If Mr. Simone Gramaglia, the violist of the Cremona Quartet, captivated us with his viola playing, he might not need to take out his flute to entertain us. And what we see when listening to the Cremona Quartet playing Bach is that we have a 1er violin, Cristiano Gualco, superlative, sharp, articulated, a 2e violin generally up to par, and a softer upright part of the stage, with a violist with sometimes sluggish sounds and a sometimes bonasse cellist, sometimes in phase with the leader of the group. We can visualize the imbalances very well towards the end with the Contrapunctus 13a, hyper held, led in trio by Gualco and the 13b, almost slumped, by the other three. It was certainly a bit cruel for the Cremona Quartet to perform in Montreal five days after the Jerusalem Quartet, but that is how life is.
There were, Sunday, very worked moments, in particular the final Contrapunctus, unfinished, with a management of textures (little vibrato, very tense sounds). But there were also inequalities and tiresome tics, like those solemn perorations at the end of Contrapunctus, when one should flow into the other. It was all honorable, but above all it showed that The art of running away in the quartet is a more than formidable exercise.
The musical event of the weekend was finally, for the nosy ones, on the screens connected to the webcasts. Klaus Mäkelä conducted the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in the 6e Symphonies of Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky in Hamburg. It’s on YouTube, offline, and it’s not to be missed.