It is Distillate of Beethoven: 21 minutes of sharply compressed music that shows him in all his violent, tragic, angry, plaintive, contemplative guises. For four months it has haunted the halls of the Curtis Institute of Music, the elite conservatory here.
In an unusual educational experiment Curtis has established Beethoven's String Quartet No. 11 in F minor (Op. 95) as the touchstone of the academic year for its 160 students. Imagine a year of medical school revolving around the liver, or a car repair course centered on the Chrysler LeBaron.
A highlight of the Opus 95 Project, as it is called, was a performance of Mahler's orchestral transcription of the quartet by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra earlier this month at Carnegie Hall in New York. Alan Gilbert, a Curtis alumnus who is to become music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2009, will conduct. The program also includes Nielsen's Symphony No. 3 and Barber's School for Scandal Overture.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Back in the wood-paneled rooms of Curtis, a cozy hothouse of talent with oil paintings, creaky stairs and free tuition, Opus 95 is everywhere you look.
Each violinist, violist and cellist has worked on the piece in a quartet with coaches; literature courses cover the Beethoven letters that mention it; the music history survey course required of first-year students will devote classes to it this week; the advanced music theory course picked apart its structure.
Bruce Adolphe, the composer and lecturer, gave a talk analyzing the work as a musical example of Tourette's syndrome. Top string players performed Opus 95 for the public in December.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The attention devoted to the piece contrasts with what Beethoven himself wrote in a letter: that it was "written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public." In this case make it a large circle of connoisseurs.
"It's turned out to be an incredible educational experience for the kids," said Roberto Diaz, the president of Curtis. "There's a common thread running through everything that they're thinking about. They're learning about how the world that this piece was created in affected the creation of the piece."
The germ of the idea came from Diaz, a former principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra who is in his second year at Curtis.
One of his favorite recordings, he said, is a Leonard Bernstein performance of two late Beethoven quartets with the Vienna Philharmonic. The program notes mentioned that Bernstein had the string players prepare by playing the chamber music version, Diaz said.
"One day I was listening to this recording, and I thought this would be so incredible for the kids at school to be able to do something like this," he said.
He approached Gilbert, who was scheduled to conduct the Curtis orchestra this year, with the idea. Gilbert suggested the Mahler transcription of Opus 95, a work he had met as a violinist with a string orchestra in younger days. Diaz took him up on it.
Written in 1810, the work is considered a culmination of Beethoven's second period and looks forward to the late quartets "in its dominant qualities of conciseness, directness and instant confrontation of contrast," the musicologist Joseph Kerman wrote in The Beethoven Quartets.
It is called the Quartetto Serioso, a rare instance in which Beethoven himself bestowed a subtitle. "The F minor Quartet is not a pretty piece, but it is terribly strong - and perhaps rather terrible," Kerman wrote. "Everything unessential falls victim, leaving a residue of extreme concentration, in dangerously high tension. But strength, not strain, is the commanding impression."
The key, F minor, is that of the Appassionata Piano Sonata, the storm scene in the Sixth Symphony and the Egmont Overture, Lewis Lockwood points out in his biography Beethoven.
At Curtis one day earlier this month, the work was on view at different angles. In the morning in Jeanne Minahan McGinn's language and literature class, Benjamin Beilman, a violinist, delivered an oral report on the quartet. "Obviously this is very typical of Beethoven," he said. "He switches character very, very rapidly." Beilman heard Beethoven's frustration at growing deaf in the quartet's angry moments. He suggested that the mood swings of the piece supported a theory that Beethoven was bipolar.
In the afternoon Gilbert led a coaching session on the quartet for the principals of the orchestra string sections: Sylvia Kim, the concertmistress; Quan Yuan, the principal second violinist; Philip Kramp, the principal violist; and Abraham Feder, the principal cellist.
Gilbert drilled them on the gesture needed to start the piece, on the lengths of notes ending phrases, on rhythmic inflections of the opening bars. The opening is "explosive, defiant, like 'me against the world,'" he said.
"It sounds a little uptight the way you're playing it," he added.
The second movement opens with a lone descending cello scale. Gilbert told Feder to "feel that delicious twinge of pain."
Several hours later Gilbert was in front of the string orchestra, rehearsing the large-scale version, which Mahler transcribed with few changes. The contrast was fascinating: from the terse, internal dialogue of the quartet to the lush and powerful communal expression of the orchestra version. Gilbert struggled to have the orchestra react quickly to his gestures, to infuse their lines with character.
In an interview later he compared the quartet version to a sports car and the orchestra version to a truck. "But I would like the orchestra to function like a sports car," he said. In both versions of the piece, he said he wanted the players to have a "highly developed point of view about the music."
Diaz said the "jury is still out" on the ultimate success of the project but suggested that the idea might be repeated with other works.
Not all the students were thrilled with the Opus 95 Project. Several said they did not have much to do with it: wind players, not surprisingly.
"The idea of a schoolwide, one-piece project is really cool," said Matthew McDonald, a bassoonist. "I just think we could have been more involved directly."
The project also took a little gentle ribbing. At the Curtis holiday party, where the students traditionally put on humorous skits, McDonald and a fellow student wrote a number about a contrabassoonist struggling through an audition.
The music? Opus 95.
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