Measured Momentum

The German noun Innigkeit is not easily translated into English.  It comes from a root meaning “inside” or “within” and refers to inner feelings that are fervent yet intimate, profoundly secretive yet longing to be expressed.  All this–and more–is contained in the tantalizingly brief Adagio cantabile that opens one of Beethoven’s most intriguing piano sonatas, a two-movement work in the rare key of F-sharp major.  The subsequent Allegro ma non troppo grows naturally out of this introduction.  Despite its simplicity and concision, the movement has a great deal of harmonic and textural variety, with plenty of fast runs in both hands to provide virtuosic excitement.

Those four short bars at the beginning are the only slow music in the entire sonata.  The second and final movement is an Allegro vivace that begins, most unusually, with a dissonance–a springboard for some extremely lively and ingenious developments.

The sonata was dedicated to Countess Therese von Brunswick, a one-time piano pupil of Beethoven’s.  The siblings Therese, Josephine and Franz von Brunswick were all friends of the composer for many years.  It is said that Beethoven had a special fondness for this sonata, to which he felt particularly close.

© 2026 Peter Laki

The string quartets of Béla Bartók are unquestionably among the peaks of 20th-century chamber music.  In these six masterworks, the Hungarian composer conveyed a classical sense of harmony and balance using entirely new and non-classical means.

The five-movement layout of Quartet No. 4 consists of two thematically related fast movements in the first and fifth place, two scherzo-type pieces (also related) as movements 2 and 4, and an emotionally intense central slow movement.  It is an example of Bartók’s predilection for symmetrical constructions.  Those constructions are realized with extraordinary timbral and textural imagination, as frequent double and triple stops, tremolos, glissandos and other technical devices add their dramatic contributions to musical form.

The first and last movements, which share most of their thematic material, differ in that the finale turns the main theme, originally a lyrical melody, into a folk dance.  The second and fourth movements likewise share their melodic outline while strongly differing in character.  In the second movement, the melody moves in small, chromatic steps and the performers play with their mutes on, whereas in the fourth, the melody is stretched out, moving in larger, diatonic steps; instead of using mutes, the performers play pizzicato (plucking the strings) throughout.

The central slow movement begins with an expressive cello solo, which is a reflection (though not a direct imitation) of the hora lungă.  This type of Romanian folk music was particularly important to Bartók because he saw it as an ancient musical form, close to improvisation.

© 2026 Peter Laki

Suite: Portraits of Josephine is a musical memoir, dedicated to Ms. Baker, the legendary expat entertainer from the Harlem Renaissance who lived in Paris. The movements chronologically describe significant milestones in Josephine Baker’s life, her humor, and quick rise to fame. The wind quintet version is in four short movements, and the entire original suite can be heard on Imani Winds’ album, A Life Le Jazz Hot.

C minor is a key traditionally associated with high drama, and therefore rarely used in serenades. We will never know why Mozart chose this key for the present wind octet for pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns.  But the work is untypical as a serenade, even with respect to the number of its movements (four), since serenades usually have at least six movements.  In addition, the work abounds in very un-serenade-like dramatic unisons, diminished-seventh sonorities and sudden sforzatos (accents), which were all characteristic of the “storm and stress” style in many minor-mode symphonies and chamber works from the 1770s and 1780s.  Mozart himself transcribed the work for string quintet—considered a more “serious” medium—in 1787–88.  The present transcription, for wind quintet, is by Mordechai Rechtman, the longtime principal bassoon of the Israel Philharmonic.

In discussing this piece, we have to make special mention of the third-movement minuet, which is constructed in canonic form.  It has a trio (middle section) where the second voice answers the first one al rovescio (turning the melody upside down).  Here Mozart may have been inspired by his friend Joseph Haydn, whose Symphony No. 47 follows similar procedures in its minuet movement.

The other movements follow standard forms:  sonata form in the first two, and a theme-and-variation in the finale, where the minor mode is finally relieved by a much-awaited switch to the major—though not before the very end.

© 2026 Peter Laki