| 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. |
