Faculty collaborates for an evening of Brahms

Author: Andrew Throdahl

Saturday evening Middlebury College Music faculty members including cellist Dieuwke Davydov, violist Paul Reynolds and violinist Katherine Winterstein collaborated with fellow string players Kathy Andrew, Marcia Cassidy and John Dunlop on a free concert of Brahms' two gorgeous String Sextets. Cassidy is on the faculty of Dartmouth college and Dunlop is principle cellist in the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. Winterstein is concertmaster of the VSO. Due to their commoraderie, the ensemble communicated quite naturally.

They brought a high level of maturity and understanding to the pieces that accentuated many of the curious elements that make these sextets two of Brahms' greatest achievements.

Both works, although abstract in intention, have programmatic elements that fit together nicely in concert. The first sextet, completed in 1860 when Brahms was 27, has an air of repose that many musicologists associate with Brahms' well-known infatuation, Clara Wieck, the wife of Robert Schumann. The second sextet, written four years later, is a monument to another love interest, Agathe von Siebold, whose name is the basis for first movement's enigmatic opening.

The performers lacked a pretension that would have muddled the conversational character of the works. They walked on stage calm yet resolute, in character with the music.

"Since the performers were all friends they were able to blend with a maturity that only comes from an intimate knowledge of the styles of the other players," said Nell Williams '09, who studies with Winterstein.

The sextet clearly worked hard to achieve the burnished tone demanded by Brahms. They managed to outline the structure of the works by quite dramatically changing color in unexpected places, notably in the stately second movement of the first sextet. Cellists Davydov and Dunlop brought out the incessant scales in that movement's central section to great effect. The performers worked to remind some of the younger members of the audience that truly great Brahms is for mature musicians only.

The brisk tempo of the first sextet's scherzo threatened to break the overall mood of the work, although the ensemble never got out of control. Some audience members emitted premature applause before the fourth movement.

"It s such a great program in which to hear the dualities within the ensemble," said Lindsay Selin '10, who has played the first sextet and receives instruction from violist Reynolds. "It's also really interesting when you know the musicians playing. You're more attuned to their individual voices."

Most amateur criticism of a "classical" concert stems from how similar the interpretation was compared to the critic's favorite recording of the composition performed. Sometimes this is the classical equivalent of hearing a bad cover of a good song, and yet another demonstration of how "classical" music is a more intellectually demanding "exercise" than popular music. Whatever interpretative decisions strayed from the norm were done with a satisfying conviction.

There is a common dismissal of "classical" music as a dead language, a "special taste," as philosopher and culture critic Allan Bloom puts it in his book "The Closing of the American Mind," "like pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand." Unfortunately, many of the students who attended the concert went because they felt obliged to see their instructors, rather than for purely aesthetic reasons.