We had a wonderful rehearsal last evening. We are digging in to the Beethoven, and what a spectacular piece it is. The music rings with excitement, power, and laughter. I thought I would share with you some of the work that goes into the preparation of our performances. Our rehearsals generally get started at about 6:45 with our agreed upon meeting time being 6:30. I got home from my day at 6:29, but I did beat the other quartet members by a few minutes. Once we begin to work we don’t ever take a specified break. When someone has to go to the bathroom they go while the rest of us either work on our parts individually, or we work on a section without the missing person. Once we start rehearsing that is what we do. Discussions of our lives and days are put off until the end of rehearsal, although sometimes we do share musical anecdotes that seem to fit with what we are working on. We usually stop at about 9:30 even though it is difficult to find a good stopping point. If there were not children and families to get back to I suspect we would go longer. We always have some sort of treat afterward as we wind down from the energy and concentration of the rehearsal.
The rehearsals are quite intense with lots of discussion about phrasing, bowing, and musical nuances. With Beethoven much of the discussion centers around dynamics. One of Beethoven’s favorite techniques is to make sudden and startling changes in the dynamic of the piece. The changes he makes are often a complete surprise because they do not follow the expected standard patterns. When a line of music goes up and gets louder the end of the phrase is often the loudest moment. In this quartet the music is clearly moving towards the highpoint and the highest point is often a change to very soft. Sometimes the opposite is true as a phrase will seemingly wind down and the end is a totally unsuspected fortissimo. It is very hard to make these changes as abruptly as Beethoven requests them to be, and you wouldn’t believe the number of times we will go over the same spot and make the same “traditional” mistake. This is especially true of finishing the big sounding phrases with sudden soft playing. When we finally get it right the music seems to jump out with an excitement that is hard to explain.
We are playing together more often this year, and it shows. We are beginning to read each other more quickly, adjust while we play without talking as much, and generally coming together faster in the difficult sections. The second movement of the Beethoven is a doozy, but we were able to get through the entire movement at the end of last evening’s rehearsal. During rehearsal we even had to pull out the metronome for one section, which is a little unusual for us, but our final run through at the end of the evening went well. While it will take a little fine tuning to make it truly performance ready, it was pretty close after just one rehearsal. We worked on the first two movements last evening, and we will work mostly on the last two movements at our next rehearsal. To give you an idea, both movements are over ten minutes in length. For the most part we are not working on notes as it is expected that the quartet members will come to the rehearsal with the notes learned. Our time is spent on creating music by matching what the members of the ensemble do. We match the lengths of notes, type and direction of bow strokes, dynamics, and we try to find the balance between the four voices that brings out the most excitement and musical integrity. Many of the nuances we spend time on will not be specifically noticed by the audience, but when we match up all of our nuances the result is a crisp and polished performance that lets the music speak for itself. While a patron may not say that the group did a wonderful piano or a startling forte, the overall impression that comes out is of music that has power and excitement. That is what should come from good Beethoven. For the most part his music is not subtle. It is bold and it forces itself upon you and makes you sit up and take notice. This is the effect we are working hard to achieve in his 7th quartet. We hope you will come and see if we get it right.
We are really looking forward to the April performance. Please join us on April 26th at either 2:30 or 7:00. Series and individual concert tickets are on sale now.