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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Virile, Exuberant Rush
February 18, 2001
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By Michelle Dulak
Bay Area string quartet lovers, as I've said in this space before, are spoiled for choice. Not only do we have several first-class ensembles in residence, but the great quartets of the world routinely pass through (or at least close enough) on tour. The Morrison Artists' Series at San Francisco State's McKenna Theater brings in several such ensembles a year. The reason it is not better known is, I fear, one of the very reasons it ought to be: The concerts are free. There is still a lingering idea out there that a free concert must be substandard. Those who attended Sunday's recital by the Brentano Quartet will know otherwise.
Good quartet playing involves both unanimity and difference, the action of the players as a single body as well as the independence and distinctness of the individual parts. But, for all that, the best quartets ordinarily fall broadly into two groups according to the emphasis they choose. Is the primary virtue the illusion of "oneness" (meaning blend, precise matching of tone colors, razor-edge ensemble)? Or is it the interplay of distinct voices, the sense of the players as individuals?
The Brentano Quartet, more than any other I have heard (unless it be the period-instrument Quatuor Mosaïques) delights in playing each emphasis off against the other, to the confounding of both. The moment the sharp distinctness of the players' sounds and styles has you hearing them as simply heterogeneous, they throw in some virtuoso trick of ensemble, a meticulously-choreographed ritardando or a jaw-droppingly precise convergence on a run.
The instant you then start to think of them as merely a mechanical unit, one player will "intervene" willfully, individually. It's not a tightrope act, a careful balancing of priorities; it's a virile and exuberant rush from one priority to the next and back again. I've seldom enjoyed watching four musical minds at work so much.
You could hear the Brentanos' method from the very first bars of Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet (K. 465), which opened the program. The mysterious adagio that opens the work began in eerie stillness and suspense; the dynamics were tightly controlled and finely graduated as one player after another entered. So much we would hear from any top-flight quartet. But the passion that burst forth only a few bars later was not so common. And it was a passion of individual voices, led by cellist Nina Maria Lee, but enveloping and possessing all the players, who cried out in turn, every one with a different voice. Lee indeed seemed often to take the lead. She is a flamboyant and impetuous musician, one who can't help but inflect everything that passes before her eyes (or beneath her bow). But her colleagues are scarcely less individual. Mark Steinberg, the leader, is an elegant player, with a lithe sound and a tight vibrato. His technique is idiosyncratic: He certainly spends more time at the tip of the bow than does any other violinist I've seen. (And he has an assortment of facial tics whose like I haven't encountered since I last saw the Lindsay Quartet's Peter Cropper play.) The second, Serena Canin, has a much more conventional playing stance. But even where she was playing near the frog and Steinberg near the tip, they meshed well. And the violist, Misha Amory, has a woody and warm tone that was a fine foil to Lee's uninhibited energy, though the seating (viola outside, cello inside) put him at a disadvantage. Together, they made for great Mozart. The passage that stands out for me is one early in the slow movement, where the first violin and cello are in dialog, the inner parts accompanying. The dialog was real dialog — each speaker really responding to the other, not just "trading off." And the accompaniment was real accompaniment — alive to the possibilities in the leading parts, anticipating and mirroring and sometimes even prompting them.
Beethoven's late C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op. 131, took up the second half. A young quartet like the Brentano is in some danger when taking up late Beethoven (and this of all pieces!). But they need not be shy about putting themselves forward in this music, for this was a very fine performance, one that did justice both to the piece's continuity and to its kaleidoscopic assemblage of moods. No atmosphere was beyond their reach, from the studied quiet of the opening fugue, to the purely physical exuberance of the second and fifth movements, to the long and winding paths of the central variation movement, to the violence and vehemence of the last. Their range of tone colors (and of dynamics) was large. And they didn't hesitate to stoop to Beethoven's own level of humor when, toward the end of the fourth movement, the cellist breaks in on the variations with a loud, vulgar "plunk." (Lee played her role to the hilt.) In between came the Second Quartet of Vitezslav Novák, written in 1905. Here is a piece (and a composer) essentially unknown outside Central Europe. The Morrison Series doesn't run to program notes, and the quartet didn't see fit to introduce the piece, so the audience was essentially flying in the dark. But what wonders they found there!
Novák's Quartet is a beautiful work, though difficult to describe. It begins with a slow fugue, tinged with modal harmonies (quartet players will know what I mean if I say it sounds a bit like the quartet fugues of Glazunov and his circle). But that is only the opening. The harmony becomes progressively tenser and more involved, sweetness gives way to complexity and anxiety. (We are roughly in the realm of Strauss and early Schoenberg here.) Then serenity returns. The piece resolves up into the air, ending on an impossibly high tonic chord with a lingering appoggiatura on top, of the kind beloved of Mahler, resolving only at the last moment. Afterwards: a "Fantasia" that takes a variant of the fugue theme through a wardrobe full of guises (the main one a Slavic-tinged scherzo in which Serena Canin, the second violinist, got to strut her considerable stuff) and back, ultimately, to the fugue itself, melting tranquilly into the ether, as it did the first time. In an interview with the English string-players' magazine The Strad some months ago, the Brentano players denied any interest in making recordings in the near future. (Oddly, they did not mention their one already-issued recording, of music by the New York-based composer Bruce Adolphe.) I hope they will reconsider, if only to give the Novák the publicity it deserves. None are better placed to do it. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©2001 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |