Mason-Thomas Chamber Music Soirée: 3rd

     “Messrs. Mason, Thomas, Mosenthal, Matzka and Bergner gave their Third Classical Chamber Soirée at Dodworth’s Hall last evening before a large, critical, and appreciative audience. . . .

     Haydn’s Quartette is a delightful composition; it is true music, made up of pure melody and rich harmony, combining the natural vocal elements with the best and untortured resources of science.  It is an inspiration of melodial [sic] flow, with an attendance of imagination and delicate fancy, tenderness and pathos.  It was very well played; the subjects were clearly developed; the artistic shadings, which give color to the whole work, were carefully defined and its scope and design intelligently interpreted. The adagio was full, the movements the most specially deserving of praise for delicacy and tenderness of execution and for purity and breadth of intonation.

     The quartette by Brahms is by no means to our taste; it is long and dreary; its ideas, not particularly good or striking, are spun out till they are thread-bare.  The Poco Adagio is very pretentious, but analyze it, and one phase [sic] of Haydn’s Adagio contains more heart, more passionate pathos than Brahms’s whole movement of long-drawn-out platitudes. The Scherzo and Finale Allegro, contains [sic] a few bold thoughts, which gave us hope, but these were soon lost in labyrinths of involved figures and unconsecutive phrases, which betrayed a poverty of invention, and although a certain quaintness characterizes these movements, it partakes rather of grotesquerie than imagination. We acknowledge no pleasure in listening to this quartette, except in its execution.

     Mr. William Mason sustained the piano most excellently. He led the movements with firmness and brio; his phrasing was fine, and his interpretation throughout was artistic.  He has not done himself so much justice in public for a long time, and we are pleased to record his deserved success. Brahms is hard upon the stringed instruments, but the artists acquitted themselves in excellent style. But the general feeling, we are satisfied, was not in favor of the composition.

     It was a glorious relief to listen to Beethoven’s quartette, after the foregoing number.  It was like the sun beaming out through a fog.  The broad, grand thoughts so pregnant with matter and intelligence, the deep and earnest pathos, the passionate tenderness, and the clear dominant ideas running through all, dwindled Brahms into littleness.  There is meaning in everything Beethoven did, and he produces effects never dreamed of by smaller minds by means as simple as they are wondrously ingenious.  The artists seemed to attack this quartette with a keen relish, and played it in a manner altogether admirable for spirit, clearness, brilliancy, accuracy, feeling, and color.  It was altogether the master-piece of execution of the programme, and was greeted with the most cordial applause.”