Greg Stepanich

Upcoming: Music by Bridge and Arriaga

On the rarities beat: Two concerts in the next few days will offer local audiences the chance to hear a couple out-of-the-ordinary pieces.

On Sunday, the American Chamber Players return to the Society for the Four Arts with a program including Beethoven, Brahms and the Phantasie Quartet in F-sharp minor by the English composer Frank Bridge.

Bridge (1879-1941; here's a short bio) was a violinist and composer best-known today for being one of the teachers of Benjamin Britten. A look through the Web shows some movement overseas in his home country on his behalf as a composer whose work deserves to be heard, but I can't remember the last time I heard anything by Bridge here.

There's a nice passage in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Britten, in which Britten, in a 1960 interview, reminisced about being 14 years old and getting his first lessons in tough editing from the senior musician:

(Bridge) used to perform the most terrible operations on the music I would rather confidently show him. He would play every passage slowly on the piano and say, "Now listen to this -- is this what you meant?"... And he really taught me to take as much trouble as I possibly could over every passage, over every progression, over every line.

Strikes me as excellent advice. You really don't know what you've written until you review exactly how it comes across.

I'm not familiar with the Bridge quartet, but I'll be listening to it Sunday afternoon with interest.

And then there's the Barcelona-based Orquestra de Cadaques, which is appearing at the Kravis Center on Monday night and Tuesday afternoon (ticket info here). The Monday night concert features works by the major Spanish composers of the 20th century: Granados, Albeniz and de Falla.

But Tuesday's 2 p.m. concert contains the one and only symphony by the tragically short-lived Juan Arriaga, born in Bilbao in 1806. A prodigy, he wrote string quartets, an opera, choral works and other pieces in addition to the symphony, but died in Paris in 1826 at the incredibly early age of only 19, felled by tuberculosis.

I don't have a recording of the symphony, but I've heard it, and thought it was a fine piece. It's hard for it to stand on its own, though, attached as it is to such a dreadfully sad story of great promise, cut off before it was anywhere near its realization.

A friend of mine at music school once told me of a conversation he'd had with a singer who was trying to put together a career, and had said he was on the verge of real progress. The singer was in his mid-30s, and my friend pointed out, rather cruelly it seems to me now, that Franz Schubert was only 31 when he died, had contributed a great deal to civilization anyway, and what exactly had the singer accomplished by the time he turned 31?

It's even harder to come up with a good defense when you're talking about Arriaga, who didn't even see 20. The only other creator I can think of who was finished as a writer in his teens but still managed to create something special was the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and he was done at 19 only because he wanted to be (he lived to be 37).

So probably the best thing to do is head over to the concert and hear the symphony. It's understandable if you want to weep for what was lost, but it's surely better to celebrate what little music we have by Arriaga, who at least created enough to be remembered, nearly 200 years after his extremely short life began.