San Francisco Classical Voice

It's an unusual string quartet concert for which late Beethoven provides the light relief. But so it was at the Alexander Quartet's fine recital at Herbst Theater last Tuesday. The concept behind the program was an interesting one: three composer's last quartets. The actual program--Beethoven's Quartet op. 135, Janacek's Intimate Letters, and Mendelssohn's F-minor Quartet, op. 80, with each piece ratcheting up the emotional intensity a notch higher than the preceding--was as effectively designed a recital as I've heard in a long time.

The Alexander Quartet has been busy, not to say obsessed, with Beethoven for the last several years, recording the complete quartets and taking the cycle on an extended tour. By now, then, their way with the composer's music is pretty much a known quantity--big-toned, sleek, impeccably voiced, and technically immaculate. In the Beethoven those qualities led to a slightly undercharacterized rendition of the first movement. Something of the music's sheer quirkiness was lost to the Alexanders' suavity and grace.

But the rest of the piece came off very well indeed. The scherzo, with its infernally tricky interlocking rhythms, was brisk and sure-footed. First violinist Ge-Fang Yang flew through the wild acrobatics of the trio with nary a slip. The slow movement was played with the finest sense of line and voicing and with a quality of rapt stillness that is surely harder to achieve than it sounds.

And the finale's balance of high drama and whimsy was perfect. The ominous "question" of the viola and cello (Paul Yarbrough and Sandy Wilson) was answered with cheeky insouciance by the violins (Yang and second violinist Frederick Lifsitz). And Wilson's exquisitely airy second theme was a marvel. In a quartet repertoire full of dramatic and furious and technically exacting cello solos, there is almost no better test for a quartet cellist than those eight bars (and their later reprise). Sandy Wilson is a big-league quartet cellist.

If there is a danger in the Alexanders' Beethoven, it is that their technical accomplishment is a hair's breadth from mere facility. There is almost too much ease, too much confidence. Opus 135 is the most genial of the late Beethoven quartets, a piece that the Alexanders' suavity fits unusually well. But how would the quartet deal with the stormier music to follow? I shouldn't have worried. The Beethoven was good, but the remainder of the program was even better.

Janacek's Intimate Letters, completed only a few months before the composer's death, is an extraordinary tumult of passionate emotions, swerving literally moment to moment from ecstasy to desperation to pain and back again, all the while demanding completely unreasonable technical feats from the players, especially the first violinist. (I shudder to imagine the toll the piece must have taken on the gut E-strings still in general use when it was written.)

Ge-Fang Yang's superb technique got around most of the impossibilities in fine style (though even he came to grief occasionally, as in the screamingly high passage of the third movement). The hair-raising sixteenth-note ostinato passage toward the end of the first movement was as clean and accurate as I've ever heard it.

But I was surprised and disappointed to find Yang occasionally omitting notes in some of Janacek's more intractable double-stops. The lower note of the high D-flat octave ending the first movement was dropped, as (I think) were some of the more unreasonable high thirds in the finale. In a quartet of the Alexanders' level of technical skill, this was strange, to say the least.

As a whole, though, the performance was terrific. The Alexanders lit into the music with a ferocity I had frankly not suspected of them. There was no caution, no indecision, and absolutely no fear. Instead we heard a savage intensity of purpose that is exactly what this music needs to live. And Paul Yarbrough played the many viola solos--the passages Janacek originally meant for viola d'amore--magnificently.

But the Mendelssohn that followed topped even that. The piece would shock those for whom "Mendelssohn" and "Victorian gentility" are still inseparable concepts, if any such yet survive. Written after the death of Mendelssohn's sister Fanny and very shortly before his own, the F-minor Quartet is a sustained blast of fury and pain such as has few parallels before Shostakovich. So great is the emotional burden of the music that Mendelssohn forgets his ordinarily impeccable control of pace and form.

There are flaws in the piece (especially the finale) that only an agonizingly driven performance can cover. The Alexanders' performance did. There was no respite here for the listener, from the furious first movement (with a blistering coda--Yang playing with more intensity than I have ever heard from him) to the scherzo (with its menacing ostinato for viola and cello in the trio) to the wounded lyricism of the slow movement. The finale was, once again, fast and savage, with a finish whose raw power took my breath away.

Dare we hope for "Last Works II"? There are so many possibilities--Schubert, Bartok, Mozart, Britten, Brahms, Shostakovich . . .

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved