June 9, 2009: More unfinished Schubert?

Today's Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral by the Cypress String Quartet seems to have pursued the celebration of unfinished compositions by Franz Schubert that began last month when the California String Trio performed his single movement string trio (D. 471) and continued when the San Francisco Symphony performed the B minor D. 759 symphony (usually called the "Unfinished") a week later.  Today's offering was the single-movement Allegro "Quartett-Satz" in C minor (D. 703), for which Schubert then wrote 41 bars of an Andante movement.  Taken alone this movement is a powerful piece of work;  and this may be another example (similar to what I had suggested about D. 759) where Schubert's opening movement was so bold that he could not sustain the impact for three more of them.  Fortunately, the Cypress players (Cecily Ward and Tom Stone, violins, Ethan Filner, viola, and Jennifer Kloetzel, cello) performed with a boldness to match Schubert's daring in composition.

Alas, the same could not be said of the composition of Felix Mendelssohn's Opus 13 quartet in A minor.  Admittedly, Mendelssohn was still a teenager when he composed it in 1827;  and, in spite of it being his second published quartet, it was his first venture into this genre.  As the Wikipedia analysis of the work demonstrates, Mendelssohn owes a lot to Beethoven for his ideas;  but, while Schubert used Beethoven as a point of departure, Mendelssohn never really sets off on a journey of his own, content to call attention to music by Beethoven that was receiving relatively little attention in 1827.  The members of the Cypress seemed similarly content to let this music sit as a bit of a museum piece, rather than seeking out an interpretation that would invest it with that sense of journey that Mendelssohn never really established.  The composition thus served as a relatively pale (and far more than relatively prolonged) introduction to the Schubert quartet movement, which is where all the action was, both literally and figuratively.