Ah, to be back at Carnegie Hall! Like European aristocrats, intellectuals, and bohemians of the early twentieth century, I am privileged to participate in a Season, which really only gets started when I attend my first Carnegie concert of the fall. And to have it be a chamber music concert in Zankel Hall is icing on the cake.
Last night’s program featured five expert musicians—the Takács string quartet and Jeremy Denk—who have worked beautifully together in the past, so it was about as close to a sure thing as you can get. In the first half of the program, the Takács were alone onstage playing Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F Minor, followed by a 2020 piece by the young composer Carlos Simon called The Warmth of Other Suns. The Simon was well-intentioned but a bit boring, I felt; but then, I am not contemporary music’s most sympathetic fan, so you might want to ignore my opinion on this. The Mendelssohn was lovely (it generally is, unless performed by incompetent players), but somehow I found the experience of listening to it pleasant rather than thrilling. It was a good chance, though, to hear the newest member of the Takács ensemble, the cellist Mihai Marica, who recently replaced the last founding Czech in the group. Mihai’s tone is gorgeously mellow and his presence a genial one—something that is often true, I find, of cellists in string quartets, since they don’t have to keep an instrument tucked under their chins and can therefore glance around in a friendly fashion.
But it was only in the second half of the program that all of these fine musicians truly came into their own. Jeremy Denk had been brought in to perform the powerful, intense, but nonetheless collaborative piano part in César Franck’s Piano Quartet in F Minor; the four string players were his utterly worthy partners. It’s amazing to think that this ever-astonishing piece of music was composed nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. When you hear it onstage, especially in an intimate auditorium like Zankel’s, it feels fresh out of the gate, ready to grab you by the throat and shake you until you give in. (I realize I have mixed horse-racing and lion-taming metaphors here, but that is how various, not to mention exciting and emphatic, this piano quintet feels.) As an encore, they gave us the Scherzo from Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major: an emotional change of pace from the Franck, but equally difficult to do well. Listening to them, I realized that many of my favorite pieces of chamber music are piano quintets, from Schumann’s to Shostakovich’s, and that made me even gladder that these five excellent musicians have decided to team up occasionally. I look forward to many more thrilling adventures with them.