It’s not everyday that you go to hear chamber music and Beethoven happens to be the most avant garde composer you hear.

Okay, that’s not strictly the truth. The second String Quartet by Sofia Gubaidulina, composed in 1987, and performed by the Arianna String Quartet last night at the Touhill Performing Arts Center in St. Louis, was way more “out there.” In a relative sense, though, the Beethoven Grosse Fuge, was the more experimental, given that it was composed more than 150 years prior. I had not read the liner notes before hearing, but I had pondered that this had to be late Beethoven, maybe even close to the last composition he ever penned. It had a complexity that belied its composer (based on what most of us have heard before, anyway), dissonance, syncopation, and atonality.

If the composer hadn’t been named, I would have guessed, except for a few passages which were dead Beethoven giveaways, that the piece came from the late 1800s, maybe even the early part of the twentieth century. I was vindicated upon reading the program notes. Stravinsky, described as “one of the great artistic innovators of the twentieth century,” said of it, “this absolutely contemporary piece of music will remain contemporary forever.” It appeared to require a huge amount of energy from the players, who seemed only too willing and able to oblige to the fullest.

As interesting, the work was originally the sixth and last movement of the Opus 130 string quartet. Six movements! But it overwhelmed the audience apparently, so Beethoven wrote a more acceptable one and the Grosse Fuge was issued as a stand-alone composition. While we consider him the master of master composers today, even he had to cow-tow to his audience and patrons.

I’m not even close to a critic or even steeped enough in contemporary chamber music to say much about the Gubaidulina piece, except that it reminded me of Xenakis and a few others I have heard who, best as I can describe it, play with ribbons of sound. Their compositions are characterized by, not so much whole, half, quarter, or any other of the conventional discrete notes, but by streams tossed, thrown, pitched, stretched, compressed, or simply floated into the air. These compositions are a real contrast to the contemporary minimalist composers who go in the opposite direction and take discrete notes and repetition and patterns and rhythms, and subtle changes to them over time, to logical extremes.

The evening closed with Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet (Opus 44), for which the guest pianist, Einav Yarden, joined the strings. Lush and lovely, of course, but what struck me was the second movement. While described as a “funeral march with two interesting interludes,” I found it to be ethereal, dream-like, hallucinogenic even. Of course, being an amateur viola player, I was captivated by violist Joanna Mendoza’s presentation of the strong solo towards the end of the movement. Apparently, there are only a few “monumental” piano quintets from the Romantic era, Brahms and Dvorak penning the others.

I appreciated the liner notes by Kurt Baldwin, Cellist. They seemed more digestible than most program information I read at these types of events.

Learn more about this wonderful staple of St. Louis’ classical music scene: www.ariannaquartet.com