Borromeo quartet at WGBH - Beethoven's Grosse Fuge

Admittedly I check my email too often, but it can be rewarding at times. I received an email from WGBH, inviting me to a Classical Guest Street session with the Borromeo String Quartet in their studios. I clicked on their link right away and got two of the last 20 tickets. Even more lucky that Fiddler from Rockhound Place was able to go with me. They had a reception and we got to walk around the new studios a bit, I had not seen them yet.

Violinist Nicholas Kitchen introduced the audience to Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge in a multimedia program, which was very interesting and entertaining. I just LOVE to take music apart for a deeper analysis and then listen to it all put together again - so very enlightening. The quartet ended with a performance of the entire opus 133.

Written in 1825/26 when Beethoven was completely deaf, it was originally composed as the last movement of string quartet Op. 130, but later published separate as Op.133. Almost 200 years old and is still very contemporary even today. The four voices, their themes and rhythms intertwine and cross in such a complexity and show the pure genius of Beethoven. It combines dissonance and fortissimo with quiet serenity and it surprises with dramatic interplay of silence and sudden bursts of musical expression. Cathy Fuller expressed it well: “Beethoven takes four voices, fully engaged and throbbing at high speeds, and drives them to the edge of a cliff before stopping them on a dime to listen to the vastness of silence.” [link]

The Borromeo Quartet has its home base in Boston and is the Quartet-in-Residence at the New England Conservatory. It was formed in 1989 and the group plays more than 100 concerts a year. These brilliant musicians are very accomplished and they create a passionate synergy that transcends their performance and connects to the music and its meaning on a deeper level and is in all its serious glory plain fun. I have rarely seen such a range of emotional expressions as tonight. They perform every now and then at the Gardner and I hope I can enjoy them there sometime soon. As an interesting side note, they don't use traditional scores, but cool macbooks instead and advance through the music with a pedal.

Here is an interview with the Borromeo Quartet at WNYC:


And here is the Quartet performing the final movement of Beethoven's Opus 18 Number 3 at WNYC:


Here is an interesting article by Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker:
Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and an article in the Boston Globe: Borromeos zero in on late Beethoven