Wild Beethoven, dramatic Brahms, bright Haydn

Crash.

The Philomusica Quartet threw decorum out the window when they played Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Opus 133, Monday night (April 11). And they didn’t bother to open the window first. Violinists Alexander Mandl and Jeanyi Kim, violist Nathan Hackett and cellist Adrien Zitoun hacked and shrieked through the more violent passages and played rough with the not so violent ones. It wasn’t pretty; they played extreme music at extremes. This isn’t Pride and Prejudice. It’s The Wild Bunch.

Some of Beethoven’s friends wondered whether he’d gone mad when they heard or studied his Grosse Fuge, Opus 133, when it was new in 1825. I’m not so sure they were wrong. Beethoven, always volatile and willful, was never moreso than in the highly dissonant Opus 133. He jumps from tempo to tempo and in and out of fugal procedures. He pushes the instruments to the limits of volume and pitch and stretches tonal harmony to the edge of comprehensibility. Forget sonatas, scherzos and rondos. This piece unfolds in wild, arbitrary tangents. And after all that, Beethoven arrives innocently at the home key at the end, as if all those fiery crashes had never happened. Violinist Alexander Mandl, who sat first chair, remarked from the stage that after working on the Grosse Fuge he is convinced that Beethoven would have understood Schoenberg and Webern absolutely. As the Philomusica played it, Beethoven sounded like an angst-driven German Expressionist circa 1925.

In a smart bit of programming, the Philomusica opened with Haydn’s amiable Quartet in D, Opus 64 No. 5 (“The Lark”), which showed just how far Beethoven had strayed from the more normal Viennese music of his day. (Kim sat first chair for Haydn and for the Brahms quartet at the end of the program.) The group’s bright, resinous sound and off-the-string finishes brought out the rural charm in the fiddling finale and in the rough-hewn minuet. Haydn might have painted portraits of bumpkins in these movements, but this is a sophisticated composer at the top of his game. The Philomusica played the virtuoso writing in the outer movements with great vigor and bracing rhythmic clarity. I liked the way they attacked the juicy dissonances in the development of the opening movement, and their awareness of their location in the form. They really sold, for example, the false recapitulation in the first movement.

The gorgeous, rich, blended sound they lavished on Brahms’ Quartet in C minor, Opus 51 No. 1, fit the lofty drama of the music. (It also proved that the raucous playing in the Beethoven to be an aesthetic choice.) The players united in the surging phrases and pliant, articulate rhythm. Alert, secure phrasing and accenting brought out that sense of meshing, dissimilar meters that Brahms loved to bury in his textures.

They also conveyed the most important thing: The sense of an epic drama being played, of ardent passions unleashed and exchanged, on a big landscape. This quartet isn’t Pride and Prejudice, either. It’s Wuthering Heights.

This program ended the Philomusica’s season. The group plays at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, where it is quartet in residence.