Music for pianoforte, combined with two or more bow instruments, is usually constituted on anything but democratic principles, the percussion instrument standing to the others in very much the same relation as Jupiter to his satellites. But the splendid quintet by DvorÀk given last night forms an honourable exception to this principle, the Bohemian composer's well-known preference for bow instruments having apparently counteracted the usual tendency to make the pianoforte part too prominent. Throughout the quintet there is an endless wealth and fertility of beautiful ideas. The opening allegro is based on two main elements which form an effective contrast, the one moving prevalently in syncopated double time, and the other approaching the character of a tarantelle. The pianoforte part is sometimes of independent interest, and sometimes consists of beautiful accompanying passages constructed from chords in extended position. The second movement bears the name "Dumka," which, we believe, was first used as the name of a musical movement by DvorÀk, or at any rate first became familiar to the world in general through his works. It is derived from a Slavonic root meaning "to think," and may be taken as something like the equivalent of "meditation." There are several peculiarly interesting and charming movements in the works of the Bohemian composer bearing this name, and that which occurs in the quintet is one of the best. It is in the relative minor of the opening key, and exhibits the composer as a poet of the same sort as Burns—at once sturdy in bearing and delicate in feeling. Here and there the pianoforte part conveys a suggestion of Chopin; but the courtly sentiment of Chopin is soon merged in a broader and more full-blooded vein of feeling. The thematic material is remarkably varied and episodic, while the Scherzo—called, as in other Bohemian compositions "Furiant"—is compact and free from any trace of the rambling tendency. The finale is dominated by a dance theme in double time of enormous energy and vivacity.

The Op. 96 Quartet might almost as well be called "From the New World" as the Symphony. Whether it was written during the composer's stay in America we do not know, but it is certainly an outcome of his American experiences no less than the "New World" symphony. All the themes of both those works are idealised Negro or Red Indian melodies, and though the results may not be in the Quartet quite so wonderfully felicitous as in the Symphony, they are fine enough to make it a most interesting feature in the music of the wonderful Bohemian composer's American period. That music has taught some of us a rather important lesson. The value of folk-melody has long been recognised, but until these works by DvorÀk became known it was pretty generally thought that Negro tunes formed an exception to the principle that all sincere, unsophisticated, and original musical utterance has artistic value. DvorÀk has taught us the danger of regarding any natural thing as common or unclean. He has shown that Negro melody may give rise to beautiful works of art no less than Irish, Hungarian, or Scandinavian melody. DvorÀk is the most impossible to classify of all composers. He is naÏf and yet a master of complex and ingenious design; a scorner of scholastic device and at the same time a successful worker in the classical forms; the most original of the composers who became known during the latter half of the 19th century, yet suspected, on occasion, of the most barefaced plagiarism. It is hard to say whether his absolute musical invention, his skill, taste, and resource in laying out for single stringed instruments, or his ear for orchestral colouring is the most remarkable faculty. He is the musician who seems to have learned but little from text-books and professors, and yet, by a continual series of miracles, he avoids all the pitfalls that beset the path of the unlearned composer. He is never at a loss—never does anything feeble or ineffective,—but again and again overwhelms and delights us with his inexhaustible flow of racy and full-blooded melody and with his splendid handling of whatever instrument, or group of instruments, he may choose to handle.

The third Razoumoffsky Quartet stands among Beethoven's chamber compositions very much as the C minor Symphony among his orchestral works. To define the qualities in virtue of which these two cognate works appeal so very strongly and directly to the imagination is a matter of great difficulty. They belong to the same period; and, utterly dissimilar as they are in form and detail, they are akin to one another in spirit. Both reveal the composer during that short but golden prime of his artistic life when he had done with technical experiments; and when that austere indifference to mere sensuous beauty of sound, which in course of time his deafness inevitably brought, had not yet begun. Hence these works, though they fall far short of the exaltation, intensity, and rugged grandeur of many third-manner compositions, are more perfectly balanced. They are also entirely free from certain perverse—one may almost say misanthropic—elements which are a stumbling-block in much of Beethoven's music. Such is the felicity of the invention that each new thematic element strikes the ear like a sort of revelation. Nowhere is there an overlong development or anything that bewilders or alienates. The Andante quasi Allegretto of the Quartet reveals the composer in an extremely rare mood. The delicate romance of it recalls the slow movement of the Schumann Quintet, however much more profound Beethoven may be. The harmony is full of dreamlike beauty, and here and there accents of extraordinarily eloquent appeal give that impression (so frequent with Wagner) of music trembling on the verge of articulate speech. A case in point is the recurring G flat in the viola part in bars 8, 9, and 10 after the second repeat. The pizzicato bass is another feature that irresistibly arrests attention. The unparalleled delights of this enchanting work were brought home to the audience by a performance which was not only masterly but was stamped by peculiar felicity. Everything in the marvellous Allegretto was thrown into a kind of delicate relief, and the fugal finale was given with the utmost animation and perfection of detail.

The association of Lady HallÉ and Dr. Brodsky in Bach's Concerto for two violins yesterday brought together by far the largest audience ever yet seen at these concerts. The D minor, with two solo parts, is doubtless the finest on the whole of Bach's violin Concertos. The Largo, cast in a mould that the composer used more than once, obviously takes the first place among movements of the kind, in virtue of stately magnificence paired with a certain royal mildness and amiability of expression. Other examples may be deeper or more poignant in feeling, but none other is so richly and perfectly organised in structure or so sweetly benign in expression. The two solo instruments are treated by the composer on a footing of absolute equality, and the manner in which his intentions were yesterday realised by the two masterly performers was above praise. Why (one is likely to ask on hearing such a performance) did a composer, who could make a couple of instruments sing so sweetly and graciously and in a manner so perfectly adapted to their proper genius, very frequently force the singing voice to follow a crabbed line, instrumental rather than vocal in character? In the more vivacious movements preceding and following the Largo nothing could have been finer than the delicate interplay of the two well-matched solo parts, and the whole composition lost little or nothing by the rendering of the accompaniment on a pianoforte instead of the small orchestra for which it was originally scored. As pianoforte accompanist Miss Olga Neruda showed unfailing discretion, and so contributed not a little to the exquisite impression produced by the whole work.

In Beethoven's B flat major Quartet—the last of the third volume—the intricate lines of the composition were brought out with admirable unanimity of purpose, perfection of ensemble never once being lost amid the utmost fire and freedom of the execution in the rapid parts. The Quartet, which occupies quite forty-five minutes in performance, is remarkable for an opening movement in which adagio and allegro sections alternate with wayward frequency, for the curious fourth movement in a sort of LÄndler rhythm, and for the Cavatina in E flat preceding the Finale. It is capricious and multifarious, but has neither the abstruseness nor the occasional violence of the later Beethoven as revealed in the last Quartets and Sonatas.

TchaÏkovsky's first Quartet is chiefly remembered in connection with the Andante, which makes a peculiar appeal to the imagination. Though the thematic basis is evidently derived from folk-music, and the tones of the muted instruments are such as one associates with "soft Lydian airs" that merely play upon the senses without further significance, there is in this movement a strange mystical exaltation that is not often met with in TchaÏkovsky. It sounds like a dream of the shepherds who watched their flocks by night and heard the angels sing, or an illustration of some kindred theme in which a homely and pastoral note is associated with devout and joyous feeling. It is the movement that so greatly moved Count Tolstoy when, in company with the composer, he heard a performance of it, also led by Dr. Brodsky. The rest of this beautiful and zestful work causes one to wonder how the composer was able so early in his career to make stringed instruments speak with such free, ready, and natural eloquence.

Most astonishing are the comments that one hears and reads occasionally on such "In Memoriam" pieces as TchaÏkovsky's noble Trio, written in honour of Nicolas Rubinstein—brother of the more famous Anton and a pianist of nearly equal eminence. The psychological basis of this Trio is of exceptional clearness; it is probably clearer than in any other composition of similar extension. Yesterday, Mr. Siloti played the pianoforte part at these concerts for the second if not for the third time. Frequenters have therefore enjoyed unusually good opportunities of becoming acquainted with the music, which we regard as on the whole the best example of TchaÏkovsky's chamber composition. As in Schubert's "Wanderer Fantasie," the centre of the whole is the theme of the second movement—a beautiful and expressive strain that, in the composer's imagination, evidently symbolised the personality of his lost friend. The ensuing Variations—which include a waltz, a mazurka, and others that are anything but sombre in character—range back over scenes and memories connected with that personality, the composer now giving himself up to lively characterisation, and now thrown back into an elegiac mood by the returning consciousness of the friend's death. Occasionally the two moods are mingled, as in that part of the waltz where the dainty dalliance of the pianoforte part is accompanied by the tragic variant of the central theme in the strings. The opening movement, "pezzo elegiaco," is dominated by that tragic variant which, at the very outset, is given out with mighty eloquence by the richest tones of the 'cello—a wailing complaint that recurs in many different forms and informs all three movements in one way or another. Analysing the composition, therefore, not with reference to musical technicalities, but psychologically, we find it to consist of three main elements:—(1) The composer's affection for his friend and grief at his loss; (2) biographical reminiscences and reflections thereon; (3) the funeral panegyric. To some extent these elements are intermingled throughout the work; but they dominate the respective movements as here numbered, so that, broadly speaking, one may call the first movement "lament," the second "recollections," the third "eulogy." In all important respects the Trio strikes us as thoroughly original, though in a few superficial matters the composer seems to take hints from certain predecessors. Probably the "Wanderer Fantasie" influenced the general design to some extent; the opening of the Finale suggests the corresponding part of Schumann's "Etudes Symphoniques" by its rhythm and atmosphere, and the short "funeral march" section at the end contains an obvious reference to Chopin. One can scarcely hear a better rendering than Mr. Siloti's of the pianoforte part, which is throughout of paramount importance. Like Dr. Brodsky, Mr. Siloti was an intimate friend of the composer, and as he is also an acknowledged master of pianoforte technique and a highly accomplished musician, his TchaÏkovsky interpretations have a certain authority. Moreover, no living instrumentalist can charm a melody into life in a more suave and natural manner, and the lines of a composition always fall into their proper place in his renderings. Dr. Brodsky, always at his best in the music of his famous compatriot and friend, gave a most eloquent rendering of the violin part, and he was well matched by Mr. Fuchs, who, as before, brought out the superb opening theme with amazing warmth and breadth of style, and gave all the rest of his part in a manner worthy of that fine entry.

The Quintet, for pianoforte and strings in F minor and major, is a typical example of the composer's profound learning and immense technical mastery, of his lofty ideal as a musical artist, and of his quite marvellous originality. Judging by such a composition, one would hardly claim the gift of melodic charm for CÉsar Franck. He has little or no lyrism, and he seems to be chiefly interested in delivering music from the bondage of the tonic and dominant system, while calling upon each instrument for what is most characteristic in its technical resource. He is thus as far removed as possible from Grieg and the song-and-dance men of recent time. He is a great master of form, but he dramatises the chamber-music forms very much as Beethoven dramatised the symphony, reconciling the claims of structure and emotion with the touch of unmistakable genius. The great Quintet is written for performers whose technique is subject to no limitations. Each part is intensely alive, and at many points the listener's imagination is carried into regions never before opened up. The music proves that the composer understood his medium with extraordinary thoroughness. Some of his audacious progressions, his persistent reduplications, and his rushing unison passages one might, at first blush, call orchestral, yet more careful observation quickly convinces one that they are not orchestral, but that the special kind of eloquence in the music belongs essentially to the particular combination for which it was written. The key system is disconcerting at first. The composer seems to insist that two chords so unlike tonic and dominant as F major and D flat minor (if anyone thinks there is no such key he cannot have studied CÉsar Franck) will do just as well for the main props of an extended composition; and he has all the best of the argument. The technical interest of the work is of the keenest from beginning to end; but the poetic interest seems to develop slowly, the imaginative play being nowhere as definite as in the finale, which begins with strong passages of extreme nervous agitation and culminates in a tumultuous dÉnoÛment with strong reiterated insistence on the two chords aforementioned, above which the strings rush towards their point of repose in a unison of unparalleled energy and breadth. The subtle and heavy emotion of the slow movement reminds one of Maeterlinck. CÉsar Franck (1822-90) was a LiÉgeois who migrated to Paris, where he became the founder of the young French school—that school of which Mr. Vincent d'Indy is now the principal ornament. Another follower, much less truly distinguished than d'Indy but better known in this country, is Gabriel FaurÉ. Franck is the only great composer that Belgium has produced in modern times. The task of interpreting the wonderful Quintet was one of the most formidable that Dr. Brodsky and his associates ever took in hand. But they were equal to the occasion. With such a past master as Mr. Busoni at the pianoforte there could be no uncertainty as to the interpretation, and the immensely difficult string parts were rendered with that repose and sureness of touch which alone can make a great and complex composition intelligible.