San Francisco Classical Voice

CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW Valor & Virtuosity

May 24, 2002

By Michelle Dulak

Programming a string quartet concert is either very easy or infernally difficult, depending on your point of view. The "easy" is on hand in innumerable quartet programs — take one each from Columns A, B, and C; juggle results occasionally if you're on a long tour. This is the method that gives you the standard Mozart/Schubert/Ravel (or Haydn/Beethoven/Debussy, or Mozart/Brahms/Bartok, or whatever) program. Or . . . you can play what you're really working on. Which is what two quartets made up of San Francisco Conservatory students did last Friday night at Old First Church. The result was a pretty bracing program: Carter's First Quartet, and Beethoven's Op. 131.

When, I wonder, was the Carter First Quartet last performed in the Bay Area? Not for many years, surely. Not many quartets want to tackle this music, so difficult on both the players' and the audience's ends. The First is the "easiest" of Carter's five, the closest to familiar quartet textures and to ordinary movement divisions. But it's still a monster of a piece — huge, uncompromising, and relentlessly demanding in all four parts.

Violist Ryan Mooney talked through the piece beforehand, with the quartet members (himself included) playing little snippets to illustrate textures, themes, and transition points. It was an awkward presentation, very well planned (it must have been a tremendous help to those in the audience that had never encountered the piece before; it was certainly a great help to me), but all but buried in nerves. I felt for the fellow; he seemed terribly young — and so, then, did his three colleagues.

And then . . .

And then they sat down to play.

I know no adjective for this performance but "valiant." Such concentration and discipline, in such music! Mooney was the standout for me (he tackled the impossible viola licks in the slow movement with the air of St. George having another go at the dragon), but really it is difficult to single out players. Seyoung Lee, the first violin, was perhaps most at ease — nothing seemed to daunt her, or indeed to make her break a sweat. Second violinist Celeste Cleveland had a less penetrating basic sound but held her own and more (what a pleasure to see a second violinist forthrightly acting as an equal!). And cellist Adelle-Akiko Kearns was an arresting presence from the opening cadenza to the end.

If the Beethoven Op. 131 that followed was less astounding, it's partly because the piece is so much more familiar and the remembered comparisons so much more numerous. The opening fugue was beautifully handled, with minimal vibrato and perfect balance in the quieter sections. But after that things went a little less well. The second movement was on the loud-and-chunky side, as was a lot of the fifth (the E-major Scherzo), and in the latter movement the tricky trading off of quarter note pairs between parts wasn't quite smooth. But the long variations at the heart of the quartet were sensitively shaped and paced, and the finale had all the oomph anyone could want.

The players in the Beethoven were Michelle Mayuruma (first violin) and Seyoung Lee (again! but playing second this time); Rira Watanabe (viola), and Robert Howard (cello).

(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. )