In composing his sixteen string quartets, Beethoven flung down a challenge to the musical world of his own and every succeeding age. Scaling these artistic Everests requires consummate technique, flawless ensemble, and musical insight of the highest order.
The Juilliard String Quartet, one of the most senior of the world's ensembles, was the first in the United States to tackle the entire cycle, in New York in 1948-49. Since then, it has performed all the Beethoven quartets nearly a hundred times in Europe and the United States; the Juilliard Quartet also made the first televised complete Beethoven cycle and the first complete digital recording of the cycle. In January, the Juilliard began another complete Beethoven quartet cycle in New York, one that stretched over five months and was repeated in Boston, Pasadena, and at Michigan State University in East Lansing. This first concert, on January 13 in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, reestablished the Juilliard's position as long-lived but ever-renewed sovereign in the realm of chamber music.
The Juilliard brings a special perspective to its performances of the Beethoven quartets, a viewpoint that is rooted in its special history. The group was founded more than forty-three years ago and has the longest performance history of any string quartet now performing before the public. It was established as the quartet-in-residence at New York's Juilliard. President William Schuman wanted a group that, as he put it, "would play the standard repertoire with the sense of excitement and discovery of a new work, and play new works with a reverence usually reserved for the classics.”
Unlike some established European ensembles, the Juilliard has commissioned or performed more than 150 works by twentieth-century composers, including fifty premieres of works by Copland, Foss, Piston, Carter, Babbitt, Sessions, Schuman, and many others. This involvement with new music has accustomed the Juilliard to freshness of approach, and it shows in their interpretations of classics such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
At the same time, the Juilliard has an ensemble spirit that has been polished to a lustrous sheen over many years of rehearsing, performing, and recording together, as well as traveling together for hundreds of concerts annually. (The Juilliard still performs an average of two concerts a week.)
Spirit and Freshness
Both the ensemble spirit and the freshness of approach were evident from the very first notes of the January concert. It began, as one might expect, with Quarter No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18. The rest of the program, however, did not follow chronological order. The Juilliard has arranged the sixteen quartets into six programs, mixing works from different periods. The great Quartet No. 13 in B-Flat was played twice, first with the original Grobe Fuge ending, then with the rondo finale that Beethoven later substituted.
The F-major quartet was written shortly after Beethoven had finished a brief period of study with Haydn, who had, for all practical purposes, invented the string quartet form. The study was not very productive; Beethoven was quoted later as saying that he had
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