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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Alexander Quartet,
December 12, 1999
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By Michelle Dulak
The quality of the Bay Area's many resident string quartets is a continuing
amazement. Sunday afternoon's recital by the Alexander Quartet at San
Francisco State University's McKenna Theatre found the ensemble (SFSU's
long-standing quartet-in-residence) playing with the highest level of
technical polish--at times, almost too much for its own good.
The group's assets are immediately apparent. First is a big,
beautiful sound, lustrous from top to bottom, impeccably blended and
balanced. Second is the impressively tight ensemble. If there is a virtuoso
quartet equivalent of a violinist's pyrotechnics--down-bow staccato, say, or
double-stopped artificial harmonics--it's the subtly rubato-ized phrase in
which the four players seem to be controlled by a single mind. The Alexanders
may be little too fond of this sort of thing, but they certainly
showed they can do it.
The individual players are very strong. Leader Ge-Fang Yang is
unusually reserved for a first violinist, elegant rather than brash, while cellist Sandy Wilson, with his rich, intense sound, is the most arresting personality of the four. The violist (Paul Yarbrough) is bold, the second violinist (Frederick Lifsitz) bright-toned and assertive, but without overshadowing the first. Together they are confident, powerful, technically immaculate, never less than thoughtful.
There are certain emotional limitations in their approach. An ensemble that can traverse a middle-period Beethoven quartet (the E-minor, Op. 59 No. 2 ) without tasting desperation or exhaustion or fear is missing something through the players' very facility. The eloquence of risk was not there; the Alexanders played boldly and brilliantly, but for all that, they were still playing it safe. With that caveat, this was fine quartet-playing. The Alexanders have been immersed in Beethoven for the last several years (they have recorded the complete quartets for the Arte Nova label, as well as presenting the cycle live several times both at home and on tour). They have clearly thought through the quartets with some care. The performance of the E-minor Quartet was full of nice little details, like the artful balancing of voices in the serene slow movement, or the startling extra power the group saved for the very last return of the finale's rondo theme. And the actual sound was unfailingly beautiful (no mean feat in the inhospitable acoustic of the McKenna Theatre). Haydn's G-major Quartet, Op. 76 No. 1, fared much less well. The slow movement was reverently and beautifully played, and the stormy minor-mode finale, taken at an incredible clip, was terrific (at least until its final transformation into the major, which fell flat). But the first movement was disappointingly generic, the Alexanders seemingly taking no joy in its interplay of gestures or its contrapuntal games. And the minuet's trio, a dancing first violin solo over pizzicato accompaniment, was worse--metronomic, stiff, and humorless. The quartet seemed to have trouble relating to Haydn's lighter manner, a fatal difficulty in this, of all Haydn quartets, with its complex dialogue of drama and comedy. The sense of physical gesture, of motion as vivid as speech, that Haydn's music needs if it is to live, wasn't there. Wayne Peterson's 1999 Pop Sweet, which followed the Haydn on the first half, is his third string quartet and the second he has written for the Alexander Quartet. As one might expect from the cutesy title, the piece is on the light side. More puns are in store, too: the first and last movements are titled respectively "Samba these days" and "Can this grass be blue?," the former veering from tango to samba to bossa nova to habañera, the latter (more loosely) based on country fiddle styles. In between comes a "Lament" that the composer described in his spoken introduction to the piece as a homage to the quartets of Debussy and Ravel, but which sounded (to these ears) more like early Berg, uneasy and harmonically dense. The Alexanders' performance was polished and incisive, although one could imagine a more uninhibited approach than Ge-Fang Yang's to the first movement's slithering melodic lines. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |