![]() The Andante, the ravishing song-without-words of its principal melody rationed beautifully over its course, from cello, to violin, to viola (so that it hauntingly recurs but never cloys), had just the right quality of heartfelt but never mawkish rumination. The Scherzo was dazzling, all its surprises deftly sprung. The varied and elegantly designed first movement was gorgeously encompassed. Top-drawer as those executants were, I doubt they fulfilled Schumann's aims in this music any more effectively than did Groh and the three Tokyo members on Thursday. This was polished to a high sheen, yet as fresh and thrilling as it must have been when first it sprang from Schumann's racing pen and had its premiere in 1842 by Schumann's brilliant pianist-wife Clara Mendelssohn's superb Gewandhaus concertmaster, violinist Ferdinand David the distinguished Danish composer and violist Niels Gade and Count Marvi Wielhorsky, the cellist who had commissioned the work. The performance, however, was neither so refined nor so fresh as one has come to expect of this long-admired ensemble.Īll the more striking, then, was the account of the The A-minor quartet is a lovely work, with unaffected, resourceful homages to Bach, Haydn, Schubert and Mendelssohn embedded in a dialectic - a distinctive sense of harmony, rhythm and the arabesques of melody - that is Schumann's alone. 1 and ended with the third work from that same opus, the ![]() It was perfectly placed at the centre of a program of Schumann's chamber works, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the German romantic composer's death. Piano Quartet is a breathtaking, heart-lifting masterpiece in its own right, needing only such a performance as these four musicians gave it to reveal its glories. How exciting it was, therefore, to realize, on Thursday night at Music Toronto, when the German pianist Markus Groh joined the first violin (Canadian Martin Beaver) the viola (Japanese Kazuhide Isomura) and the cello (Englishman Clive Greensmith) of the Tokyo String Quartet, that the 47, composed a month later, in the same key but with one instrument fewer, is a kind of comedown, a smaller thing, put together from the quintet's leftovers. ![]() 44 is such an original, inspired, Vesuvian triumph that we have always been allowed to think that his ![]()
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