Lovely Afternoon of Beethoven Chamber Music at St. Paul's October 4

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Saturday, October 4) I got two reviews done for Fanfare magazine, and in between I went to a nice concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featuring the Rev. Penny Bridges, who in addition to pastoring the church is also a quite good amateur viola player (no viola jokes, please!). She led a concert featuring two chamber works by Beethoven, one little known and one well known. The little-known piece was a duet for viola and cello officially called “Duet mit zwei obligaten Augengläsern,” which means “Duet with two obligatory eyeglasses.” Apparently Beethoven gave that title because the violist and cellist for whom he wrote it were both nearsighted and needed glasses to read the music – which caused the audience at the church to chuckle when both Bridges and her cello partner, Janet White, put on glasses so they could read the music. The piece is usually believed to have been written in the late 1790’s (when Beethoven could still hear) because one theme has a resemblance to the first movement of the string quartet Op. 18, no. 4, which was written about the same time. According to the program notes for the concert, citing Fritz Stein, “The autograph score is hastily written and partly illegible. Dynamic marks are entirely lacking, and only in three places are there indications as to legato and staccato.” There are only two indications as to when the players are supposed to bow and when they’re supposed to play pizzicato. Also, though Beethoven’s manuscripts were in the same collection, the two extant movements were discovered at different times, and the usually knowledgeable St. Paul’s audience clapped after the first movement even though that’s supposed to be a bozo no-no at classical concerts. It was great fun to sit front and center, especially to watch Janet White manipulate her cello and use lots of finger vibrato – none of this “historically-informed performance” nonsense about the absence of vibrato for her!

The main piece on the program was the second of the three “Razumovsky” quartets commissioned from Beethoven by a Russian nobleman, Count Andreas Razumovsky, in 1805. Razumovsky had stipulated as part of the commission that each quartet had to reference a Russian song in one of its movements. Beethoven composed them the following year, and the concert notes for the program described them as a revolution in quartet writing much the way Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony had revolutionized the symphony. Frankly, I’d have rather they’d played the third Razumovsky quartet, if only because the slow movement opens with a lovely pizzicato passage for cello that sounds to me an awful lot like a jazz walking-bass line. For the quartet the duo added two violinists, Peter Ouyang and Bruce Windhoffer (and, according to the notes, Windhoffer was playing a violin he made himself). Ouyang’s intonation was a bit iffy – nothing too outrageously bad, but his tendency to play sharp made the opening chord of the second “Razumovsky” sound even more dissonant than usual – but other than that it was a lovely late afternoon of chamber music. The group, collectively known as the DelMar Quartet, really tore into the ensemble passages of the last two movements in particular. The church was taking donations at the door for the construction of a new dedicated space particularly for solo and chamber-music concerts, as well as vocal recitals, and I tossed in $20 (the usual cost of a concert at St. Paul’s when they actually charge for them).