On Tuesday, November 12th, the Jupiter String Quartet played a program of three pieces at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts: Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95, Kati Agócs’s Imprimatur, and Schubert’s String Quartet in G Major, D. 887. It was their first appearance this fall after a previous collaborative concert was postponed, and their audience seemed eager to hear them. Of the three pieces included on their concert, one (Agócs) is a contemporary commission, and two (Beethoven and Schubert) are slightly less famous pieces by well-loved composers, which is pretty typical of the quartet’s repertoire.  

Their opening number — Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 — is the 11th of Beethoven’s 16 string quartets, and the last before the five famously considered the “late” quartets. It begins with a movement in Sonata-Allegro form, as so many classic quartets do. It also has a dramatic Beethoven opening: a short, emphatic, forte gesture written for all four members followed by a silence before continuing. Strictly speaking, this is not an experimental quartet, and yet it manages to feel that way. It has the standard four movements, and on paper they conform to their usual roles. In practice the second movement takes much brisker allegretto tempo than second movements typically do, casually sidestepping the usually-clear contrasts between movements. The Op. 95 premiered in 1810 near the end of Beethoven’s so-called “middle period” (1802–1812), an extremely public and productive ten years where he produced many of his most famous works, including the Fifth Symphony, the Violin Concerto, the opera Fidelio, and the Fourth Piano Concerto. In that light, perhaps it’s less surprising to find him testing the strength of some formal conventions. His pieces from this period tend to be longer, and a listener can hear his individual voice emerging from the conventions of the Classical era. The solo work is nearly always written for the violins, and makes this quartet feel two-dimensional toward the end. It surprised me because in his symphonic works, Beethoven isn’t shy about writing meaty parts for cellos and basses, and uses them to great effect to make an orchestra sound much larger than its personnel might suggest. Perhaps he was simply not reaching for such grandeur in this piece. 

The second offering was Kati Agócs’ (KAH-tee AH-goach) Imprimatur (2018), a quartet commissioned jointly by The Aspen Music Festival and School, Harvard Musical Association, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the 15th Anniversary of the Jupiter String Quartet. Agócs draws on Roman Catholic tradition for the quartet, and the title Imprimatur can signify both an official affirmation or approval to print a text as well as a mark of distinction or imprint. In the composer’s note to the piece, she describes the seven movements of the quartet (performed without interruption, in the style of a tone poem) as a meditation on “how a single idea imprints itself on the memory through rapturous reimagination.” This description is a remarkable guide for how to listen to the piece: trying to hear broader conventional forms within it like the quodlibet is more distracting than it is instructive, and it works better to listen for smaller repeated elements throughout. The closest way I can describe their development is “kaleidoscopic,” not passing through serial processes but also not strictly formalized. 

The final installment was the String Quartet in G Major, D. 887 (No. 15; 1826) by Franz Schubert. This was the clear audience favorite. The piece is, in many ways, a short symphony disguised as a string quartet, and at nearly 45 minutes it’s longer than the first two pieces put together. Of all three pieces its melodies were also the most tuneful. Similarly to Beethoven, Schubert was experimenting with some formal structures, though his results preserve the fast/slow/triple/fast contrasts that characterize quartet and symphonic pieces. His real experiment is prioritizing lyricism over strict formal harmony, and this is what makes this quartet such a pleasure to listen to. Schubert also is diligent about making sure that there are plenty of contrasts in instrumentation in the quartet — a feature that the Beethoven ultimately misses — by giving the viola and cello regular opportunities to shine, both as soloists and as a duo. The alto voice in particular (viola, in this case) is regularly unappreciated in ensemble settings until it is missing, at which points things tend to sound thin, brittle, or hollowed-out. In Scubert’s quartet it not only gets to be the glue that holds this exceptional 19th century cover band together, but also gets some time of its own in the spotlight.  

Even compared to their usual high standard the Jupiter String Quartet’s execution of the Schubert quartet was remarkably good, so much that it overshadowed the first half of the concert a bit. Periods of unapologetically dramatic tremolos in the second movement — all four of them were really going for it — drew the audience in like nothing else. The quartet, both the piece and the musicians playing it, really stuck the landing too. The melodies are singable, the counterpoint and independence of all four voices are on display, and the piece culminates its emotional journey with joy that’s clearly felt by the ensemble. After their early-season postponement, the quartet seem glad to be back.