When Quartetto Gelato brought the house down in the concert that closed the Valley Concert Society’s 2024-25 season, it should have been a perfect night—our largest crowd since the pandemic, outstanding musicianship, rapturous applause, spontaneous laughter, exclamations of joy from attendees after it had ended.
Despite all that, violinist Tino Popović felt compelled to offer an apology from the stage. The object of his qualms? The long-dead Johannes Brahms. The group had just performed a piece entitled Brahms’ Polka. That would be the polka that Brahms never wrote. That would be a mashup of five decidedly non-polka works from Brahms’ oeuvre played as we have never heard them. It started with his famous Lullaby done beer-hall style.
I felt the urge to find Tino after the concert to offer him my absolution. I was sure that he would never receive it from the dour composer, even if he had magically appeared to witness what happened to his music. And, given the ecstatic spirit in the building that night, I’m sure there would have been a long line of concertgoers assuring him of their pardon.
Aficionados of classical music have acquired a reputation, deserved or not, for purism, for snobbery, for intolerance. The great composers are venerated. Their music must be played just so. Appropriate responses are awe, profound emotion, intellectual analysis.
We have had concerts this season that touched these notes, hopefully without the snobbery. musica intima exposed us to the newest in choral trends. The Butter Quartet took us back to the oldest of techniques with their historically informed performance on period instruments. Stefan Jackiw walked us through emotional depths in Smetana’s trio. The beauty of Schubert and Chopin came to us through the hands of Jarred Dunn. Johan Dalene amazed us with the musical pyrotechnics of Tzigane.
And then there was Quartetto Gelato. They cut a hilarious swath through the masterpieces of Brahms. What would he have thought?
I’m sure Mozart would have loved what they did to The Magic Flute. The film Amadeus put his sense of humour on full display. Bach, with all his stern Lutheran church music, could also have fun, as in his Coffee Cantata. Gabriel Fauré, whose Sicilienne was played so beautifully by Dobrochka, was known to play tricks on his students.
But Brahms? There you have the classic earnest, German composer. He agonized over his works. It took him close to twenty years to worry his first symphony into existence from start to finish. He was socially awkward. He dumped a fiancée unceremoniously. He could be brutal in his assessment of music he did not respect.
So it’s a good thing for Quartetto Gelato that he did not appear out of the mists to scathe their caricature of his genius. Or would he have seen the humour too?
This stern character did show an occasional propensity for fun and irreverence himself. When he was feted with an honorary degree by a university in Breslau, he learned that he was expected to compose something for the event, so he did. He composed and conducted the Academic Festival Overture, a classically structured mashup of five drinking songs that would have been very familiar to every student in the building. The school administration was taken aback. One of them asked, “Did you really quote The Fox Song?” It was a freshman ragging song. Yes, he did.
I think Tino has nothing to worry about. Far from anyone demanding an apology on Friday, the audience showed what they really thought with shouts and cheers and applause. And I can imagine even Brahms listening in from on high with a twinkle in his eye and a mug of beer in his hand.
John Wiebe - President
The Valley Concert Society