The "Opus One" rubric is an intriguing common thread. Beethoven and Dohnányi wrote their pieces at similar points in their careers, and my reactions are different mainly because I know Beethoven's later music better than I do Dohnányi's. For Dohnányi, what strikes me is how thoroughly and convincingly he made the tradition his own, both in technique and in musical rhetoric (challenging and sometimes beating Schumann and Dvořák at their own games - there are clear allusions at various levels to both Schumann's and Dvořák's piano quintets). For Beethoven, he's surely done likewise to the tradition of Mozart and Haydn that he was born into. What I'm drawn to is gestures and moves that already at Op.1 prefigure some of the characteristics of all of Beethoven's music, but will still go through so much further development in the next four decades of his life.

Mozart is not really a fair comparison; precocious though he was, one cannot expect Mozart at about 7 to be on equal footing with Beethoven at 25. Still it's an engaging piece of music, already showing an intuitive understanding of much of the style and structure of early Classical music and beginning to explore its limits.

 

This will be my second time at Festival Mozaic and my first as a chamber musician. I've known Scott for 15+ years since his undergraduate days at Harvard and played in many concerts in his Metamorphosen chamber ensemble, so I'm particularly looking forward to joining with him on all three pieces - all the more so since one of them is the rarely played but remarkable Dohnányi quintet, which I think I first heard with him playing the same violin part that he will play at the Festival Mozaic concert.

I've been involved with both music and mathematics since before I can remember (by age 3 according to my parents' records). The connection between math and music is widely felt at an intuitive level, but hard to pin down beyond specific technical issues like rhythmic structure (mathematicians may have an easier time with irregular rhythms used in Dohnányi's quintet) and musical intonation. I might live long enough for brain science to weigh in on some of the more mysterious connections that we feel but can't easily express. There's certainly an influence, but not an obvious and direct one that words can readily describe.

 

Mendelssohn - another musical prodigy whose first published composition (a piano quartet, written at age 13) might be played at another Opus One concert - once said that it's hard to write about music because music is so much more specific, not less, than the words that we try to describe it with. The same is surely true of mathematics; it might also account for my difficulty of writing coherently about the relationship between music and mathematics...