Groupmuse Night Out

We can't keep METTING like this! Another Night Out at the Museum

Central Park, New York

Thu, May 11, 2017 6:30 PM, EDT

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Capacity: 0 of 121 tickets available
: Don't bring your own drinks
: Alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks for sale
: No bathroom at this event
Wheelchair access: Wheelchair Accessible

This is a Groupmuse Night Out

Explore the wider world of music outside Groupmuse with exclusive discounts to local concerts.

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This is not our first Night Out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it's our first that features Johannes Brahms' fabled masterwork: The Clarinet Quintet, brought to our ears by the world-renowned Chiara String Quartet and a clarinetist every bit their match in Todd Palmer. The Chiara will also premier a new quartet by the award-winning American Pierre Jalbert.

These tickets normally start at $40, but, because we're groupmuse, we've got a whole stack of them for $25! So bring a friend, and blow your mind!

The music starts at 7pm, but we encourage you to show up as much as an hour early, enjoy a glass of wine, and hobnob with other Groupmusers and culture-lovers.

Also, the ticket purchase gets you all-day access to the Museum. If you show up earlier in the day, pick up your tickets at the box office in the Great Hall and head on into to the Met's hallowed halls. The Museum closes at 5.15pm and the doors to the concert hall don't open until 6pm, but from 5.15-6 you can wait inside if you just show your ticket to a security guard. They’ll point you in the right direction. Alternatively, you can hang out in Central Park on an evening in May for a bit. Worse things have happened!

Enjoy!

IMPORTANT LOGISTICAL INFORMATION
- Enter at the ground level entrance at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue, NOT the main entrance - it won't be open.
- Pick up your tickets at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. It opens at 6pm - feel free to come early and get a glass of wine.

The Clarinet Quintet (1891) comes from the last period of Brahms’ creative life. The hero of Beethovenian Romanticism was entering his twilight years as a revered and beloved master. It was the end of a great and important cycle in western cultural history - modernity was right around the corner with the car, the airplane, The Great War - and Brahms could feel it in the air.

He’d actually already officially retired from composing. The ever-insecure genius had decided, at only 57 years of age, that the world had no use for a dinosaur stuck in the conventions of the classical forms - symphonies, concerti, string quartet, all of which he’d mastered. In response to the burgeoning New Age of industry and big cities - and its attendant disillusionment - artists had started deliberately challenging the forms. In a few short years, they would shatter completely, leaving Brahms a dated old grouch. He didn’t want that.

But then he met Richard Mühlfeld, a clarinetist so deep and so inspired that he evoked a late summer in Brahms - and he picked up his pen once again. Some of Brahms' deepest thoughts come from this late period of his life, including a clarinet trio, two sonatas for clarinet and piano, and this clarinet quintet (for clarinet and a string quartet), which reigns supreme.

The sense of sad farewell that undergirds the swirling warmth of the Clarinet Quintet speaks of a old master at the end of his days and at the changing of the guard. He’d brought chamber music to some if its greatest heights and this is something of a capstone - arguably his finest achievement. It perfectly embodies the seeming paradox at the center of Brahms’ creation - a true and raw emotionality with a breathtaking craftsmanship and attention to form and detail. He’s a bleeding heart but he’s also a watchmaker, and as the strings and the velvet clarinet ribbon around one another through four movements - with swells of sadness and lullabies and moments of verve and humor - Brahms bears witness to a vision of a world fast disappearing into the past.

If you don't know the Clarinet Quintet, do yourself a favor and take five minutes with the third movement right now. In the opening moments, listen to the matte and humble clarinet wandering almost childlike through the space Brahms creates - the cello provides a rich woody floor, and the viola quietly picks up a contrasting melody, like an older sibling mouthing words of caution. But soon all the strings are swept up in the fantasy of the clarinet’s first theme, ripening it with thick harmonies. This opening luxuriously plays itself out until 1.35 seconds, when it settles on a sunset.

Suddenly, a mutation of the first childlike theme pierces the peace in the strings like a fever. The theme is now jagged and anxious - all the leisurely wonder from before is gone from it. The clarinet skitters up and down itself, like shivers of delirium. It’s allowed a brief soliloquy at 1.58, lamenting the loss of the innocence it once knew, but at 2.08, a violin sharply rebuts, chiding the clarinet for such naivety. It tries to respond, but the other strings have picked up the chorus, and the clarinet's cries are lost in the fever. The dynamic builds in intensity as the instruments swing around each other in a dizzying climax, and it seems like the fever might break at 3.10, but there's no such relief and the jagged, mutated theme in the strings hits again and again.

The clarinet's soliloquy comes back at 3.32 - but this time it's fully reinforced by the violin, more robust and wiser in the ways of the world. The familiar fever comes back, but it seems less disjointed now with the clarinet better integrated into the family of strings, having learned a thing or two. Full consonance is achieved by 4.19, and for the last 15 seconds of the piece, the clarinet's first childlike theme from the very beginning returns. But it's more mature, with much more background support from the other strings, and when it settles on its sunset once again, it's for real this time.