CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW: By Janos Gereben (Alexander String Quartet, January 7, 2007)

CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW

Alexander String Quartet

January 7, 2007

Alexander Quartet

Wayne Peterson

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Vibrant Silence Resounds

By Janos Gereben

The year's first concert in Kohl Mansion's remarkable chamber-music series brought the Alexander String Quartet to the Burlingame school's Great Hall on Sunday, with a varied and substantial program encompassing Mozart, Shostakovich, and Wayne Peterson. The San Francisco composer, a Pulitzer-Prize winner, was present for the event; his biography says he'll turn 80 this year, but he looks decades younger.

The rich, diverse program was bracketed by a great beginning and a magnificent ending. The Quartet tore into Mozart's Divertimento in D Major, K. 136, with fierce energy, the frequently heard opening theme bouncing back from the hall's high ceiling with a fresh, robust sound that transformed familiarity into discovery. And, at the end, one of those rare, breathtaking moments that makes us all keep going to concerts: the supernal final measures of Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 3 disappeared into the silent hall ... and nothing happened, for a long, long time. In that highest, rarest expression of appreciation, the audience joined the musicians in "performing" the resounding, collective, lengthy silence that's an essential, rarely heard part of the music, and its perfect culmination, before they erupted into applause.

Grafilo: primus inter pares

The Alexander was in rare form, but first violinist Zakarias Grafilo was easily "first among equals," with a sterling performance all evening long, especially in the Shostakovich. His violin leading, singing, grieving in the early movements, it was his fragile pizzicato notes at the end of the work — against the gentle, tentative strumming by the others — that helped create the silent response to the performance. The work, written after the end of World War II, which devastated Russia utterly, leads the audience from the pre-war lull ("unawareness of the future cataclysm" in the composer's description), through the approaching storm ("rumblings of unrest and anticipation"), war's brutality erupting ("the forces of war unleashed"), an anguished, unrelieved, funeral "homage to the dead," to the final helpless, uncomprehending "eternal question: why and for what?"

Second violinist Frederick Lifsitz has a unique ability to blend his voice into the ensemble and yet remain an affecting solo voice. Violist Paul Yarbrough contributed the sound of an armada to the war in Shostakovich; cellist Sandy Wilson was as involved and expressive as ever, in a mighty duet with the viola in the Shostakovich, in clever solo passages in Peterson's work.

Radical, rad Pop Sweet

Peterson’s 1999 String Quartet No. 3, Pop Sweet, is a hoot, in a good way. The composer claims a "radical stylistic departure" from his other works, "quite tonal, less contrapuntal, more consonant, and considerably more traditional." He may well be right about the other descriptions, but "traditional"? The three-movement piece consists of “Samba These Days” (a tribute to South American music), “Lament” (with a quote from Li Shang-Yin, a late Tang Dynasty poet — something that went right over my head), and “Can This Grass Be Blue?” (miscellany that includes a portion Peterson described as "strongly suggesting an overzealous consumption of Budweiser"). So that would be "traditional" in what sense?

The first movement's melange of samba, bossa nova, tango, and habanera is entertaining. Peterson cites the influence of Debussy and Ravel in the second movement, but I heard a somewhat toothless Stravinsky, especially the feeling of the String Concerto in D, but quite without the haunting, scary sense of that music as it appears in the Jerome Robbins ballet The Cage. Rather than insects devouring each other, in “Lament” there is only a feeling of mild discomfort.

In the last movement, the composer tries, but fails, to pull together blues, pop, something he calls a "surreal, polychordal restatement," and impressive polytonality. But when the work ended, I was still trying — in vain — to place the alleged tradition to which it conforms. Much easier to see was the Quartet's obvious enjoyment in performing the work, and performing it surpassingly well.