Showing posts with label Smetana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smetana. Show all posts

Wednesday 25 July 2012

Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 (in E Minor) - given The Proms 'treatment'

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 July

This was played last night, in the Prom's first half, for the first time there.

I have no idea why. (Or why applause was needed after every movement*.)

I am now less resentful of what Mahler did to orchestrate Schubert's String Quartet No. 14, Death and The Maiden, because it still sounded like Schubert:

This orchestration, the work of George Szell, had little identifiable connection with the original, and used brass, amongst its textures. Perhaps the composer's intentions in writing a quartet, which we were repeatedly told contained a motif at the end that represented his blindness (or was it, after all, deafness?), were as dispensable as good employee relations in Ohio.
If you had asked me what I was listening to (without the benefit of whoever's wisdom it was beforehand, or to schedule), I would have had no idea, although I like this string quartet. All grist to the orchestral mill, I s'pose.

End-notes
* Unless it was shocked, grieving applause in embarrassment by those who knew the original.