KARENIN’S SMILE There is a moment in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being when the couple Tomas and Tereza attempt to distract their dying dog, Karenin, from his discomfort. (Named after the husband in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, the pet nevertheless is female.) They play a favorite game involving rolls, from a nearby bakery, that seem to provide temporary relief, if not for the dog, then for Tomas and Tereza. “Standing there watching him,” writes Kundera, “they thought once more that he was smiling and that as long as he kept smiling he had a motive to keep living despite his death sentence.” Smiling or otherwise, animals make an enchanting contribution to this program in Leoš Janáček’s Concertino, as they will to an even greater extent later in the festival in Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals. It isn’t necessary, of course, for creatures great and small to be on the premises for the works at this concert to prompt smiles. Mozart is at his fetching best in the String Quintet No. 3 in C major, K. 515, while Saint-Saëns goes to extremes of emotion in his Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 92, that can’t fail to keep ears riveted. But back to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was a very busy writer of masterpieces in 1787. Along with the C major quintet this year, he composed the String Quintet No. 4 in G minor, Ein musikalischer Spaß (A Musical Joke), Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music, for two violins, viola, cello, bass), and the opera Don Giovanni. He scored all six of the string quintets he wrote from 1773 to 1791 for string quartet and an additional viola, causing these works to be referred to, somewhat confusingly, as “viola quintets.” All of the pieces are in different keys. The String Quintet No. 3 in C major has the distinction of being the work that inspired another Austrian composer, Schubert, to write his sublime quintet in the same key, but with a second cello joining a string quartet. (His “Trout” Quintet has an even more unusual instrumentation: piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass.) The presence of the second viola in Mozart’s quintets, it must be said, adds richness to the overall textures, and it provides another voice in the profusion of exchanges throughout the four movements. 7
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