Epic concert series
After the Elias String Quartet finishes its six-night cycle of performances this week, the ensemble will take a break from Beethoven. The quartet’s undertaking, which began a week ago, was formidable: It is playing all 16 of Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets in chronological order through six performances over two weeks.
That’s nearly 500 minutes of music as complex as it is enduring. The Elias — violinists Sara Bitlloch and Donald Grant, violist Simone van der Giessen and cellist Marie Bitlloch — undertook its “Beethoven Project” at Wigmore Hall in its home base of London in 2014. Since then, the quartet has typically broken up the music with multiple visits to a particular city, mixing up the quartets from three periods in Beethoven’s life. But in rescheduling the Elias after a COVID cancellation, Sarah Rothenberg — artistic director of the local chamber music and jazz organization Da Camera — was drawn to the idea of presenting the music in one span chronologically.
“When museums do a retrospective, they usually try to tie the earliest work at the beginning to where the artist ended. I wanted to hear that with this music.”
She felt Houston would be ready for such a program. Rothenberg says Da Camera’s patrons, after two years of a pandemic, “are starved for live music by a string quartet.”
The task is challenging but not insurmountable. The Elias String Quartet has done combinations of Beethoven cycles in North Carolina and Iowa, so Marie Bitlloch says, “there won’t be a lot of very deep rehearsing. We won’t spend hours working on one bar.”
Still, on a Monday morning the quartet settled into the Menil Collection to “get used to the acoustics and touch up a few corners we feel like we could improve on since the last time,” Bitlloch says.
The quartet spread the six performances over two weeks. “Concerts like this,” says Bitlloch, “they make self-preservation important. We have to look after our bodies.”
Played in such a compressed period of time, Beethoven’s complete string quartets serve as something of a creative autobiography of the composer. Having left Bonn for Vienna in 1792 to study under Joseph Haydn, Beethoven frustrated his mentor while moving toward an explosive period of creativity. In the middle of that decade he began composing his first piano trios, piano sonatas and cello sonatas.
Hadyn had decades earlier made a strong impression with his own string quartets. Haydn “took over the string quartet as a vestige of the old Baroque dance suite and developed it into an ambitious genre similar to the symphony and sonata,” Jan Swafford wrote in his “The Vintage Guide to Classical Music.”
By 1798 or 1799, Beethoven was working with the form, creating his first cycle of six in his late 20s and early 30s. He’d return to the string quartet in 1806 and again between 1809 and 1811. Then, after a lag of a decade or so, the composer again pushed himself into a flurry of activity between 1824 and 1826. He died in 1827 at 56.
Consider a 30-year span in any life, with the slow arc of a persona in flux.
“I think Beethoven is one of the rare artists who continued to evolve over time in a transformative way,” Rothenberg says. “There’s a lifetime of experience in his quartets.
“His life was as extreme as his music.”
Add to the aging process this particular composer’s deafness and health issues. “In one week, you can hear 10 years of his life and work,” Bitlloch says. “And each minute of each quartet is amazing. As a performer, you have to live in the moment, but at the same time, the minutes create a journey.”
Inked notations on a page do not change, but the music retains an organic quality through interpretation. As much as a person and composer might change over time, Bitlloch says working closely with pieces like Beethoven’s string quartets also offers opportunity to reflect on one’s life and art. “We evolve, we have babies, we take different jobs,” she says. “So each time we revisit these quartets, they’re charged more with our life experience. Each time we have changes with members, the whole vision of the quartet can change. And that’s great. It brings a new thing. When you introduce a new performer, it adds this bonus of letting you hear something familiar again for the first time.
“New ideas, new feelings. Nothing is set, ever.”
She likens the pieces of music to a poem or a painting. “There are a million ways to interpret both,” Bitlloch says. “As interpreters of these quartets, we try to decide what the composer meant and what it means to us to deliver it, to share it.”
A narrative has codified around Beethoven’s “late quartets.” The composer was deaf, combative and nearing death. These little biographical elements certainly contributed in ways to the music. It’s difficult to separate the slow and somber fifth movement of Opus 130, the “Cavatina,” from the composer’s state at the time of its creation.
But Bitlloch points out, “Even if the first six were all he composed, we’d be happy and impressed.”
Rothenberg says the program’s Cycle I on March 28 — comprising Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1, Quartet in G Major, Op. 18, No. 2 and Quartet in D Major, Op. 18, No. 3 — “showed that he started boldly. It was an electric evening.”
Bitlloch says the chronological approach underscores the ways the later music can connect back to the earlier works.
“To me, what’s fascinating is when you put all these pieces together, you see little glimpses in the early quartets of what Beethoven would become later. There are signs, more than signs, movements in the early quartets that could well have been on the later quartets.
There are moments in the early works where I think, ‘Hang on, how old was he ?’”
In the nearly two centuries since his death, Beethoven never vanished from concert halls. But particular attention was to be paid to his music in 2020, which would’ve been the 250th anniversary of his birth. Because of the pandemic, many of those celebrations were tabled or canceled.
But Rothenberg sees no reason to only celebrate his music on notable anniversaries. She speaks with enthusiasm about the placement of the Elias performances during this Da Camera season, nestled between an internationally covered world premiere of a new composition by Tyshawn Sorey at the Rothko Chapel last month and a pair of late April performances by Nathalie Joachim and the Spektral Quartet that mix classical, Caribbean and electronic music.
Modern as these shows bookending Beethoven are, they also draw deeply from him. Rothenberg will perform a solo piano program in May that places Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111 in between a world-premiere piece written by jazz composer Vijay Iyer and another by Morton Feldman, who was the inspiration behind Sorey’s recent work.
“Sometimes Beethoven is put into the category of overplayed establishment composer,” Rothenberg says. “But composers today speak about his aliveness.”
Bitlloch says, “I’m expecting to be slightly changed at the end of this.”
She laughs because she’s getting ahead of herself.
“I’m also looking forward to putting the music on the stand and turning the pages, one by one, taking it all in.”