First Monday at Jordan Hall

He's more than a bunch of symphonies and songs. Even those are not what you think. And although the music stopped with his death in 1911—100 years later, his time is now. During four months of concerts, jam sessions, conversation, and film, free your mind about what Mahler really means.

In 1876, Gustav Mahler, then 16 and a student at the Vienna Conservatory, wrote the beginnings of a piano quartet.  He completed the first movement in A-minor and about 24 bars of a scherzo. He never finished the work and it remained unknown until its rediscovery in the 1960s. Cellist Paul Katz, as a member of the Cleveland Quartet, along with his current NEC faculty colleagues Donald Weilerstein and Martha Strongin Katz, performed the North American premiere in Carnegie Hall with Michael Tilson Thomas as pianist—as an addition to an orchestral concert conducted by MTT in which the Cleveland Quartet was already performing Morton Feldman's Concerto for Quartet and Orchestra.

The uncovered Mahler work also delighted the Russian/German composer Alfred Schnittke.  A composer some have called the Mahler of his day, Schnittke had created a new style, "polystylism", in which he juxtaposed and combined music of various styles past and present. He once wrote, "The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so." Schnittke used Mahler's quartet fragment as material for the second movement of his 1988 Concerto Grosso No. 4/Symphony No. 5, and then in 1989 published his own piano quartet, which explicitly quotes Mahler. This has inevitably invited a paired performance like the one on tonight's concert, where the Schnittke work fills the function of Scherzo to Mahler's Adagio. Schnittke's fascinating mash-up of gestures and ideas in the Piano Quartet suggested to the writer Seth Brodsky “…the faded handwriting of one composer covered over by the handwriting of another, only to bleed through after all.”  For NEC’s Mahler Unleashed, the Schnittke work underscores a thread running through the entire festival—Mahler’s works reimagined, his own reworking or arranging of other composers’ music, and his borrowing of indigenous styles and idioms for his own works.

Join the musicians of First Monday at Jordan Hall, NEC's most popular concert series, curated by Laurence Lesser, as they perform this unusual work and music of Brahms and Spohr.

Mahler Adagio for Piano Quartet and
Schnittke Piano Quartet
Gloria Chien, piano; Lucy Chapman, violin; Dimitri Murrath, viola; Paul Katz, cello
 
Spohr Nonet in F-Major, Op. 31
Julie Scolnik, flute; Robert Sheena, oboe; Michael Wayne, clarinet; Suzanne Nelsen, bassoon; James Sommerville, French horn; Lucy Chapman, violin; Dimitri Murrath, viola; Natasha Brofsky, cello; Donald Palma, double bass

Brahms Piano Quintet, Op. 34, in its original format as a quartet plus second cello. 
Jupiter Quartet, Paul Katz, cello.