Venice – “Lo Squero” Auditorium: Quartet of Venice and Maurizio Baglini
In the concert practice that has been steadily in existence for more than a century and a half now, the performance of quartets and quintets for piano and strings involves, with very rare exceptions, the union of a soloist (in almost all cases, who sits at the keyboard) with a group of musicians who, instead, carry out their activity in almost constant symbiosis. In particular, the quintets par excellence “for piano”, which join the traditional string quartet to this instrument, require the collaboration of the more compact and closed musical formation, present in its entirety, with an artist accustomed to playing in full freedom . This is not the place to tell the evolution of an organic that only in the last five years of the eighteenth century, with twelve compositions by Luigi Boccherini, posthumous publications, seems to emerge from the model of Sonates pour le clavecin, with the accompaniment of deux violons, viola and cellos, to which Mozart’s first three Viennese concerts can also be linked. We would say that the “piano quintet” reaches adulthood only with theOpus 44 by Robert Schumann, although even this (certainly beautiful) composition still has a concertante character in part; and full maturity with Brahms and his great Quintet in F minor. Initially conceived for strings only (with two cellos, in the manner of Boccherini and Schubert) and then transformed into a sonata for two pianos, it finally became what was heard in Venice on Saturday 18 December: a work so comparable that it does not let us suppose the troubled, four-year gestation and to which after more than a century and a half we would approach only that of Shostakovich.
At the moment of announcing the first encore to the public gathered at the Squero, on the Venetian island of San Giorgio made even more fascinating by the thick fog, the pianist Maurizio Baglini, undoubtedly “strong” personality, underlined the happiness and speed of the agreement reached with the Quartet of Venice (Andrea Vio And Alberto Battiston, violins; Mario Paladino, Violet; Angelo Zanin, cello), a complex with no less marked characteristics. The five artists, for the first time together, had been able to create a meeting that they have been thinking about for some time and that it is hoped will soon have a follow-up.
The limited depth of the platform available at the Squero led the artists to give up the more frequent arrangement, with the string quartet arranged in front of the piano, which was instead placed in a slightly angled position, to the right (for the spectator) of the cello. . The excellent acoustics of the Squero, combined with the sensitivity and experience of the five musicians, allowed them to make a good start from this difficulty, obtaining, without losing the grandeur desired by Brahms, a clarity of the voices that is particularly appropriate for contrapuntal episodes that innervate the broad composition. The Pisan pianist played a great Fazioli, an instrument whose timbre peculiarities he can exalt, as can also be heard in his complete recording of Musorgsky’s piano work.
Brahms’ writing often brings to the foreground, in close dialogue with each other and with the piano, even the so-called “internal” voices of the quartet, the second violin and the viola, which on Saturday 18 had many opportunities to shine. The profound depth, the intense cantability and the sonic splendor of the ensemble led the audience present to such a warm and prolonged enthusiasm that the artists, after having repeated the third movement, also repeated the second.
The afternoon had begun with Quartet in C minor op. 51 n. 1 by Brahms, in an ideal dialogue with the concert for the forty years of activity of the Venice Quartet, last October 21 at the Malibran Theater. If then the execution of the Quartet in A minor op. 51 nf. 2 struck us for the infinite dynamic and timbral facets that demonstrated Mozart’s nostalgia, this time the richness of the system and the subtle emotional kinship that binds the slow movement of the quartet, not surprisingly entitled “Romanza”, to the “Cavatina ”Of Beethoven’s Opus 130, one of the favorite pieces of Vio, Battiston, Paladin and Zanin.
And in the end, after playing with total commitment for over an hour and a half, the five artists manage to transform the admired words of those who stopped to greet them and accompany them on the vaporetto into a joyful exchange of emotions.
The review refers to the concert on December 18, 2021.
Vittorio Mascherpa