#82: ‘Grammatical’ details
Section 9: Josef Suk – Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn ‘St Wenceslas’ Op.35a
The Czech Quartet viola player completely changes persona between b.1-2 — where he is a thoughtful, imaginative orator — and b.3, when he becomes a supportive harmonic pivot. This transition has a delightfully grammatical quality: the bow makes a kind of envelope that hands over responsibility in a manner that is simultaneously distinct and flowing, rather like a semicolon, and which sees him arrive at a gentler, less present sound quality precisely at the moment at which his colleagues enter. This is another example of how one can show with a kind of integrated trajectory — in this case, that related to the last note’s intensity — when another player’s phrase has to begin. A moment like this is impractical if approached as a deliberate lead; it must remain more implicit. Tonal change is especially important here because the freedom of the melodic timing in this introductory material makes counting a completely unreliable guide. It is better to conceive of the trajectory as a whole, in order to anticipate the next phrase.
The heaviness of the inner part gestures I mentioned in #81 seems to be stimulated, at least in part, by a telling (and technically unnecessary) shift by first violinist Hoffmann on the first beat of b.14. The change to the lower, heavier D string creates a certain emphasis, but he does not slide in the way one might assume of an early twentieth century string player: the change in tone is actually very clean. The effect is of a kind of rhetorical culmination, but which nevertheless remains firmly grounded within the mood of the preceding material.
The C-C shift across the string is a relatively large (and unnecessary) distance to cover in a small space of time, and might be an obvious candidate for a violinistic moment, emphasising that distance by a conspicuous slide. But Hoffmann eschews any soloistic impulse, largely covering the shift by releasing the bow at the moment of travel, and playing the arrival note with a bare sound (with very little vibrato). It is specifically the weightiness of his tone here that performs the critical function: of arriving at a destination that the harmonic texture has been circling for the previous bar and a half. In the process, he sets up a cascading trajectory for the remainder of the bar, which is completed by his inner part colleagues.
