This year's Mainly Mozart Festival, at Coral Gables' Colonnade Hotel, is mainly devoted to other composers. Though Sunday's opener was a Mozart quartet (K. 589, played with depth and warmth, ...by the Bergonzi Quartet), the potent magnets were the rare Brahms vocal duets and Mendelssohn's Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13...
It was another real bonus to have Mendelssohn's Op. 13 in A minor, which takes its lead from late Beethoven in the same key.For all the typical Mendelssohnian song that's embedded in its texture, it's a darkly serious work that quotes Mendelssohn's questioning song Ist es wahr? (Is it true?), and it's especially elegiac in the haunting Adagio, which presages Brahms.
The Bergonzi foursome gave it a finely judged performance, pointing up the multi-thematic writing of the first movement and Mendelssohn's phenomenal facility at counterpoint. |
