The heart of the Manhattan String Quartet’s program at Bargemusic on Saturday evening was a warm-toned performance of Bedrich Smetana’s “From My Life” Quartet, a mature composer’s glance backward from the perspective of his early 50s. Surrounding it were youthful works by Charles Ives and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and if each had its attractions, neither matched the passion, depth and emotional punch of the Smetana.
To be fair, emotion — or at least its conventional, direct expression — wasn’t an important part of Ives’s compositional arsenal. He intended his String Quartet No. 1, composed in 1896 when he was a student at Yale, to evoke a revival meeting. To that end, he draws his themes from hymn tunes, and he revels in the homey, slightly chaotic and occasionally ecstatic qualities one might expect in the scene he has painted.
The deliberate “wrong notes” that Ives sprinkled into the score may have been meant to capture the haphazardness of amateur singing, or they may be a commentary on the event itself. In any case, they give the hymn tunes, and Ives’s connecting musical tissue, an arch quality that doesn’t always wear well.
Korngold was 24 when he wrote his Piano Quintet in E (Op. 15), but he was already accomplished, with “Die Tote Stadt” just behind him, and Mahler and Strauss among his admirers. Still, this is a confused score. Much of the time it wants to sing lavish melodies in the lush, rich hues that Korngold became known for later in his career, when he wrote copiously for Hollywood. But there is a gritty side to the music as well, most notably in the piano writing, which — on the rare occasions it takes the spotlight — counters the sweet string scoring with bursts of spikiness.
Smetana was in the last decade of his life when he wrote his autobiographical first quartet and was already beginning to lose his hearing: a piercing high E in the first violin line near the end of thefour-movement score immortalizes tinnitus he began experiencing in 1874, two years before he wrote the work. But if its finale is wrenching, the work as a whole is anything but despondent: its first three movements capture the folk dances of Smetana’s youth, as well as his first love.
The Manhattan players — Eric Lewis and Calvin Wiersma, violinists; John Dexter, violist; and Chris Finckel, cellist — gave characterful performances of all three works, although the Ives and the Korngold were less consistently polished than the Smetana. Steven Beck gave a robust account of the piano writing in the Korngold.
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