San Francisco Classical Voice

CD REVIEW String Quartets, Across the Centuries

February 26, 2002

By Michelle Dulak

Of the Bay Area ensembles that have lately taken to producing their own CDs, the Cypress Quartet has surely done the most thorough job of it — a two-CD set, meticulously documented and handsomely packaged in an illustrated cardboard slipcase (though I fear I won't be the only one who had trouble getting the discs out of the thing). It certainly doesn't look homemade or slipshod — nor sound it.

Cypress' unique contribution to Bay Area musical life is a series of concerts titled "Call and Response." A pair of closely-related quartets — usually one original piece plus a second one clearly modeled on it — are joined with a third work commissioned by the quartet and meant to complement the other two. It's as interesting a commissioning program as I've seen in a long time.

The Cypress' debut CDs commemorate a "Call and Response" program from 2000, and were recorded "with a live studio audience" at Skywalker Ranch. This explains the disconcerting combination of near-perfect studio sound with applause at the end of each work. The audience is utterly inaudible otherwise; I suspect that their sound was fed in only to record the applause at the end. Why? For authenticity's sake? To emphasize that the performances were single, whole-piece takes? But you can record whole-piece takes without witnesses; and you can dub audience applause into any audio record, whether edited or not. I confess that I don't know why the applause is there, but its presence set me thinking about digital editing in a way I certainly was not at the beginning of the first CD.

A natural pairing

The program comprises Mozart's A-major Quartet, K. 464; Beethoven's Quartet in the same key, Op. 18/5; and Dan Coleman's Quartetto ricercare, the Cypress commission for this set. The two older pieces are a natural pair for the "Call and Response" project. Mozart's amazing quartet — perhaps the richest of all his 23 — was obviously the model for Beethoven's in the same key. (And not only for that — the second movement of the much later Op. 132 obviously owes a lot to Mozart's minuet.)

The Cypress' K. 464 is so well played in every ordinary sense — lithe, fluent, elegant, impeccably tuned and balanced — that I found myself wondering why I didn't like it more. After several listenings, I've come to the conclusion that the Cypress players simply aren't awed by the piece in the way I am. The playing is just a little faceless, a little matter-of-fact. Small details of melody and harmony that cry out for the musical equivalent of a caress slip smoothly by. Yet there is genuine eloquence in places (the minor-mode variation in the slow movement is especially fine).

The same matter-of-fact approach works much better in the Beethoven, which is a simpler work in every sense. This is really a fine performance. I have heard other quartets try to wring more profundity or grandeur or whatever out of the piece, but it goes best like this, straight ahead and without anachronistic fuss about the great-and-profound Beethoven.

And the Coleman? It's here that the Cypress players really come into their own. The piece doesn't seem to have all that much to do with its program-mates, apart from having a set of variations at its heart and spending a lot of time in A major. But it's strong, well-written, and blessed (or afflicted) with one tune (the one of the variations) that has stuck obstinately in my head ever since I first heard it.

Strangely loveable music

When I feel the urge to get out the metaphorical bottle of Tune-B-Gon, I know that I either love the the piece or hate it. I think I love Coleman's quartet, though I'm not quite sure why. It wanders all over the stylistic map, saving itself from sappiness every so often by abruptly changing character. I'm reminded a bit of Thomas Adès' string quartet Arcadiana, which tucks in a not-so-subtle tribute to Elgar's "Nimrod" (under the title "O Albion"), carefully surrounded on both sides by much gnarlier music. But Coleman's quartet is not so protective of its sensitive underside. "The tune" gets the last word, and the piece ends in a sort of ecstatic glow of A major.

Coleman clearly knows his Britten — and not only the Britten of the Third Quartet (though that's the influence I keep hearing in the first movement). There is a place in the middle movement, with a high violin solo over pulsing harmonies in the other three parts, that might almost have come from the "Chacony" of Britten's Second Quartet, decades earlier. It's curiously beautiful, serene and remote, suddenly intricate but with no feeling of artifice. The composer who could write that bears watching. And the quartet that could play it like that bears watching too.

As for the second CD's "enhancements" (video clips and the like), I got them to run eventually, but they were not really worth the trouble. The news here was a fine young quartet and a fine new piece; the bells and whistles (like the over-artsiness of the quartet's website) only distract.

The set can be ordered from Cypress's website at www.cypressquartet.com; its next "Call and Response" program (Shostakovich's 11th Quartet, Britten's 3rd, and a new work by Benjamin Lees) debuts next Sunday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

(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.)