San Francisco Classical Voice

Having written before about the profusion of fine string quartets in the Bay Area, I was pleased to encounter yet another one last Tuesday night at Berkeley's Julia Morgan Theatre. The ensemble was the Arlekin Quartet, an expatriate Russian ensemble formed when the players were students together at the Moscow Conservatory. For the last ten years they have lived and worked in the Bay Area, supplementing their continuing work as a quartet with orchestral playing and teaching (including a long association with San Francisco State University). On the evidence of Tuesday night's recital, they are a strong young quartet, though not without some rough edges.

The program was an ambitious one, sandwiching a brief but demanding Shostakovich quartet (No. 7) between two big D-minor pieces (Haydn's Op. 76/2, known as the Quinten or Fifths, and Schubert's Death and the Maiden The first few bars of the Haydn already evidenced a quartet with a big, evenly balanced, and carefully tuned ensemble sound, and the rest of the concert reinforced that impression. (A few intonational mishaps from leader Eugene Chukhov in the high-flying first-violin passages of Death and the Maidem were minor blemishes at most.)

The players also blend well with one another--an achievement that ultimately impressed me more than the surface polish of the playing, given the different concepts of sound involved. Violist Rem Djemilev and cellist Sergei Riabtchenko, in particular, seemingly have very different sounds--Djemilev's warm and airy, Riabtchenko's wiry, concentrated, and intense--but where the music required them to play as a duo (as does, for example, a stretch of the middle movement of the Shostakovich), they matched sounds with eerie precision. Second violinist Tatiana Freedland shares her colleague Chukhov's richness of tone and suavity of phrasing. Where the two of them played in tandem they were also a formidable team.

Ensemble, though, was a problem; too many unison attacks in all three pieces were smudged or downright off. The coda of the Schubert's finale, taken at a breathtaking tempo and played with hair-raising ensemble precision, showed what the group can really do. But that high level wasn't maintained over the rest of the movement where unison passages sometimes got a little fuzzy. Some of the more exacting passages in the Shostakovich suffered from a similar not-quite-togetherness.

Then, too, the quartet seemed sometimes not to be paying enough attention to small-scale harmonic tensions and resolutions, nor to the detailed interactions among the parts. The second violin's repeated, suspended dissonance against the first near the beginning of "Death and the Maiden (to take one example of many) hardly registered in the Arlekins' performance. In general, the quartet seemed reluctant to savor particular moments in faster music, a straight-ahead approach that made the opening movements of the Schubert and (especially) the Haydn feel rather breathless.

The variation movement of the Schubert, by contrast, brought out the Arlekins' best. The opening statement of the Death and the Maiden theme was hushed and beautifully controlled (and its reprise at the end of the movement even more so--the kind of pianissimo playing that makes an audience hold its breath). Chukhov's restless, anxious solo in the first variation and Riabtchenko's more lyrical one in the second were both outstanding. In the Haydn, the moments that stood out were the end of the slow movement (its delicate first-violin filigree deftly played) and the finale, where the Arlekins' propensity to drive forward gave the music an exhilarating feeling of headlong flight.

Shostakovich's bittersweet little Seventh Quartet is one of his tightest pieces. There's a tiny, spare first movement made up of a few enigmatic gestures; then an even tinier, ghostly slow movement; then a violent fugato, which metamorphoses into a half-hearted waltz, sweeps up into itself a bit of the first movement's material, and evaporates at last into a major triad. The Arlekins may have mollified Shostakovich's harsher colors (the group's warm tone and generous vibrato don't really lend themselves to biting irony), but they traced a path sure-footedly through the piece's many sharp changes of character.

The encore was an unexpected treat--a "Divertimento" by one Igor Frolov, originally written as a string orchestra piece for the Moscow Virtuosi and apparently arranged for quartet by the Arlekins themselves. Rem Djemilev, introducing the piece, described it as a "time machine"--the quartet, playing faux-18th-c. background music, suddenly finds itself swinging in a Manhattan club, then migrates back again. The piece was a charmer, all right, and the performance full of fun.

(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