Guggenheim Performing With Quartet

Thu., Dec. 5, 1996

William Berry Correspondent

The Spokane String Quartet brings back pianist Janet Goodman Guggenheim for a performance at The Met on Tuesday. Music by Brahms, Mendelssohn and Webern make up the program.

Guggenheim got her musical start in Spokane. Her father, Roy Goodman, owned a music store on Riverside Avenue, and her early piano studies were with her father and Margaret Saunders Ott. Guggenheim’s family moved to California during her freshman year at Lewis and Clark High School.

She holds degrees from Juilliard and the University of California at Berkeley, where she is currently on the faculty. She has worked with a heap of world-renowned artists, including Itzhak Perlman, Barry Tuckwell and Yo Yo Ma.

Guggenheim’s sensitivity and expertise in chamber music will be sounded out in Brahms’ Piano Quintet in F minor. Written during the time of Brahms’ move to Vienna, this work evolved through several stages.

It was originally conceived as a string quintet - a quartet with an extra cello - but the famous violinist Joachim was not impressed. Brahms recast the piece for two pianos and performed it with Carl Tausig at his 1864 coming-out concert in Vienna. It was not an unqualified success at this performance, but with his other works on the program, helped put Brahms on the musical map.

After Clara Schumann indicated she preferred the strings, Brahms achieved a compromise and crafted the current version. In spite of its history, the work does not sound like broken pieces gathered off the floor. It is quintessential romanticism in a classical four-movement format.

The Spokane String Quartet will also perform Mendelssohn’s Opus 44 E minor Quartet and the early 1905 Quartet of Webern. The Mendelssohn work is probably his finest contribution to the genre, written shortly after his appointment as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Supplementing his positive mood in 1837 was the fact that he had just been married and wrote the E minor quartet on his honeymoon.

Anton von Webern studied with Arnold Schoenberg from 1904 to 1908, developed and matured very quickly as a composer, and in his own way took on atonality and serialism in his compositions.

xxxx CONCERT The Spokane String Quartet and pianist Janet Goodman Guggenheim will perform at The Met at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Tickets are $15 ($12 with student/senior discount), available at The Met, Hoffman Music, Street Music, G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.

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