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CHAMBER MUSIC
A Strong Quartet Shows Its Subtle Side March 26, 2002
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By Michelle Dulak
Why the current vogue for titling concerts as though they are recordings? It's a practice that makes sense in a few cases — as when an ensemble like Anonymous 4 or the O'Connor/Ma/Meyers Trio tours with "the concert of the [already-released] CD," or a program is genuinely tightly focused and the label helps describe it ("Music in Florence ca. 1500"). But what of the Alexander Quartet's recital at Herbst Theater last Tuesday? On San Francisco Performances' website it was titled "Currents in Fin-de-siècle Music," which sounds more like a week-long musicological symposium or a Festschrift than it does like eighty minutes' worth of chamber music. In the actual program book it was the yet-more-pretentious "Fin du siècle / Nouveau siècle," possibly because someone had noticed in the interim between press release and program printing that three of the four works on the program were written after 1900.
What the Alexander Quartet actually played was a perfectly conventional standard-quartet-repertoire program that lost rather than gained by being gussied up in this way. No one — not the players, and certainly not the note writer — tried actually to connect the pieces to one another or to some turn-of-the-century "current." Not that there would have been much point in trying, given that the four pieces were Brahms' Clarinet Quintet, Ravel's Quartet, and two works of Webern (the 1905 Langsamer Satz and the 1909 Five Movements, Op. 5). Connecting Brahms to Webern: not too hard, but time-consuming. But connecting either to Ravel? Ravel's Quartet drew on Debussy's, which drew on (among others) Grieg's; you have to go a hell of a long way back in the lineage to find anything whatever in common with the Brahmsian line. Might as well title a concert of Korngold and Boulez "Currents in Mid-20th-Century Music."
It was a strong program for all that, uniformly well played and with plenty of internal contrast. I admit to being not quite convinced by the Alexanders' Langsamer Satz. The piece, an early work discovered and published decades after Webern's death, is the musical equivalent of a dark-chocolate truffle — probably the sugariest thing written for string quartet this side of Puccini's Crisantemi. The easy way to play it is to dig into the chocolate: juicy tone, lush vibrato, a little discreet portamento, nothing (of course) outside the bounds of good taste.
But this exaggerates the distance between the Webern of 1905 and the Webern of the 1909 Five Movements. There is a lot in the Langsamer Satz that is there in later Webern — not only some strange quartet textures (which the Alexanders played down), but a peculiar intensity of tone that, as it were, takes its strength from frailty. As Webern's teacher Schoenberg tried to explain it in a preface to the younger composer's Six Bagatelles, "to express a novel with a single gesture, utter joy with a breath . . . " In this early work Webern was still allowing himself many long breaths. But there is a character of almost painful intimacy in places that seems a pre-echo of the more ruthlessly compressed music to come. It is one of the few pieces that really gains from being played (in places anyway) as though it were the Cavatina of Beethoven's Op. 130. The Alexanders played it like a good, healthy hunk of Tchaikovsky, which certainly works (tunes like these can take a lot), but rather misses the point. The Five Movements were better, partly because their hyperactive shifts of mood and motion don't allow any one tone to settle in for long. The Alexanders' control and balance were very fine, especially in the many viola/cello duets, and they slipped from one manner to the next, instant to instant, with a kind of frightening agility. Not with total accuracy, though — first violinist Ge-Fang Yang was not quite his usual impeccable self. (Indeed, I could swear that he ended the first movement of the five with octaves rather than the written minor ninths.)
The Ravel Quartet that ended the concert was a marvelous performance, beautifully blended and at once subtle and strong in color (Sandy Wilson's magnificently vocal cello playing was a particular pleasure). The Alexanders having spent the last few years showing off their strength and sinew (with cycles of Beethoven andShostakovich), it's good to be reminded that they can play delicately and indeed seductively. There were a few internal-balance weirdnesses. (That notorious passage trading off between the violins in the first movement wasn't balanced at all; it was three parts Yang to one part [second violinist] Lifsitz.) But there was a great deal that was unusually lovely, and very little less than excellent. And then the Brahms, where the quartet was joined by Spanish clarinetist Joan Enric Lluna. "And then" is wrong, of course, since the Brahms, the longest and most elaborate piece on the program, bizarrely followed the Webern Langsamer Satz to end the first half. (Memo to program designers: if the most natural place for an encore on your program is at the end of the first half, something is wrong.) But logically and musically it was the climax of a fine program. Lluna is an agile player with a distinctively dark, woody sound, unusual and attractive. His mellowness compensated a bit for a rather outside-driven performance by the quartet — I kept wanting more second violin in particular. Brahms' textures are thickets, and in no piece more than this one; but every tendril is alive, and vital to the design. It seemed to me that more attention had been given to "clarifying" the texture than was really good for the music in places. But where melody led, the Alexanders were magnificent, and Lluna even more so. The first-half encore, sweet and pensive, was a Busoni arrangement of a short piece of Schumann for clarinet and strings. (Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©2002 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |