Daily Blague

The burnish deepens with time. A year from now, this will be the souvenir of a beautifully polished chamber concert that I attended last Sunday, something that will perhaps make readers feel a stab of regret for having unaccountably seen fit to do something else.

"Joshua Bell and Friends" - that's what the Mostly Mozart mailer said. And it was correct, as long as you understand that Mozart and Mendelssohn are posthumously numbered among the friends. Along with composer/bassist Edgar Meyer, who unlike the other names in the program was able to stand up for a bit of applause.

Performers are always saying that X - the work that they're about to play - is one of their favorite compositions. They mean it, at least at the time. But when Joshua Bell sang atop seven colleagues in Mendelssohn's Octet, I knew that he has loved this music for a long time. He would play it more often if it were easier to conjoin two string quartets.*

The program was very simple. A Mozart piano quartet (there are two; tonight's was the first, in g, K 478), then a work commissioned for Joshua Bell and written by his choice of composer, Edgar Meyer. After an intermission, the Octet. The Mozart, which I thought I knew very well until this evening's performance, was played by Mr Bell with violist John Largess and cellist Edward Arron, forming a piano trio that played as such against Frederick Chiu's piano. I've been listening to this work for more than forty years, but until this evening it was a chamber piece for four players. Tonight, I heard it as a piece for two groups.

I'm not going to say anything about Concert Piece for Violin until I've heard it again - except that the second of the four movements made me think of hummingbirds. That's how fast Mr Bell was playing, and how softly and easily. Mr Meyer seems to have digested Debussy, Ravel, and other French masters.

Mendelssohn's Octet is the most astonishing example of precociousness that the West has to offer. Nobody, but nobody, has ever produced its aesthetic equal at the age of sixteen - certainly not Mozart, by the way. The opening Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco begins in hushed syncopation that almost at once leaps with irrepressible glee. There is a gravely sweet second subject - as grave as a teenager could be, that is - but the opening theme keeps pushing it aside, like boys on their way to a playground. The exposition closes in a glorious cadence, and if the players are worth their salt, you get to hear the entire thing over again. The development, similarly, concludes with a pile-up of syncopations that jumps into a thrilling unison. As for the movement's finish, there is nothing to compare with its youthful exaltation. This is the uncomplicated joy of being young and (musically speaking) hot.

Mr Bell and his colleagues played the three remaining movements with undiminished élan. The Andante was a coffer of burnished sonorities, its pausing chords impossibly melted into the sense of a single note. The Scherzo, whose only semblable is the Midsummer Night's Dream arabesque that Mendelssohn wrote a year or so later, and it skittered to its finish before it seemed to have introduced itself. The Presto went out with a great roar. And then the best thing happened: the audience, especially the kids in the cheap seats, burst into applause with something like the satisfying violence of an enormous exploding water balloon. Avery Fisher Hall was flooded with delight.

* As it happens, I have actually copied out the entire first movement of the Octet. I had access to the parts (who knows how) and I spent hours copying them into a spiral notebook that, oops, was open to the last page when I began my work, not the first. I ought to run a poll. Since I now have a lovely Eulenberg miniature of the score, I really don't need my laborious backward copy. D'you think I ought to throw it out? Or ought I to keep it, as a precious labor of love - even if I never look at it again. Too bad I don't have an adoring relation to do this for me.