February 28, 1999

Good string quartets come with all sorts of internal balances. One will have its center of gravity in the viola, another in the cello, another in the violins; some are driven from the top, while in others the impetus comes from the bass. If Sunday's recital at Old First Church is representative of the ensemble's work, the Aurora Quartet is as thoroughly top-driven a quartet as I have ever heard.

Sharon Grebanier, the first violinist, is a superb player, with an opulent tone and an elegant sense of line, but she overbalanced her colleagues throughout. Where what she was playing was legitimately an accompanied first-violin solo, the results could be ravishing; passages in Shostakovich's Fourteenth Quartet were breathtakingly beautiful. But elsewhere, what ought to have been dialogue or colloquy too often became a palely accompanied violin monologue.

Chunming Mo Kobialka, the second violinist, revealed a strikingly bright and potent sound on the few occasions where she was granted the leading role. Most of the time, though, she played in duet or alternation with Grebanier, and here her playing was deferential to the point of damaging imbalance. Gina Feinauer Cooper, the violist, is an arresting instrumental personality; her sonorous playing in the viola-heavy third and fourth movements of Brahms' Third Quartet was the chief pleasure of that performance. Still, she could hardly be expected to anchor the lower half of the quartet by herself.

Margaret Tait's lightweight cello playing was the real puzzle. It's not that she can't make a powerful sound (as a few moments in Sunday's concert demonstrated), but that, for some reason, she generally opted not to. The result was a strangely unmoored quartet sonority, fierce in the upper register but without foundation.

Beethoven's D-major Quartet (Op. 18, No. 3) got a solid performance, well-prepared and well-tuned, and there were moments of real eloquence, especially in the first two movements. But of spontaneity and of humor there was very little. The first movement's many long first-violin soliloquies scrolled by almost without rhythmic inflection. The slow movement's opening, with its startling dissonances between first violin and cello, was undermined by the prevailing balances. Grebanier emphasized the notes of maximum tension, but the cello line that ought to have grated against them was too subdued to put up much of a fight.

The scherzo, too, suffered from too casual an attitude towards its harmonic dislocations. The music's twist towards F# minor in the first few bars ought to be at least a minor shock; here it was not even a bump in the road.

Shostakovich's Fourteenth Quartet is the only one of his late works in which joy sometimes gets the upper hand over despair. Amid the bleak and sorrowful instrumental soliloquies and the sardonically "cheerful" tunes are passages with an ecstatic glow like nothing else since Janacek's quartets. It is possibly the toughest of the Shostakovich quartets really to do well; unremitting angst is so much easier to project than this equivocal and unstable emotional mixture. I admire the Aurora Quartet for making the attempt, though in the end the performance didn't quite come off.

The Fourteenth is the last in a series of four Shostakovich quartets each dedicated to a member of the Beethoven Quartet. This is the quartet written for the Beethoven's cellist, Sergei Shirinsky, and it is the cello's voice (often in the highest register) that commands the music. Tait, accordingly, was thrust into the spotlight that she had avoided in the Beethoven. She handled the daunting part well, but sometimes still without the air of command that the music demanded of her. At times it was difficult to tell whether her failure to seize the leading role was voluntary. In the slow middle movement, for example, the cello takes up the first violin's opening melody in a long, unaccompanied violin/cello duet. Here it was the violin's counter-subject that seemed the main event--louder, more insistent, and more present than the cello's theme. If there is a musical equivalent of "scene-stealing," this was it.

There was some first-rate quartet-playing in this performance, nonetheless. The Shostakovich includes quasi-cadenza passages for first violin, viola, and cello, all of which were eloquently played. The finest ensemble playing came at the opening of the middle movement; the slow shifts of harmony were at once solemn and luminous. At the work's nastiest intonational hurdle, on the other hand--the recapitulation of the first movement, with the violins and viola in double octaves--the Aurora came conspicuously to grief.

Matters of balance improved in Brahms' B-flat Quartet, Op. 67, with a hearty collective sound that was well-suited to the music. Tait still seemed too reticent (underplaying, for example, the great cello-led passage in the middle of the slow movement). But Cooper came into her own in the Agitato third movement, arguably the juiciest viola solo in all of Brahms. The theme was wonderfully played, rich and plangent, and the two cadenzas (yes, cadenzas) full of bravado. Her heady timbre also carried the beginning of the variation-finale, where Brahms (with a nod to Beethoven's Harp Quartet) gives a prominent variation to the viola.

Elsewhere, I found myself wishing occasionally for more plain fun. Brahms' fondness for rhythmic intricacy pushed him almost over the top in this quartet's first movement, with its persistent threes-against-fours and syncopations. Music like this is at risk of sounding artificial and sterile, unless the composer's ebullience--his sheer joy in rhythmic possibility--spills over into the performance. In the Auroras' strong but slightly measured reading, it wasn't quite there.

(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