San Francisco Classical Voice

CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Thinking Through the Quartet Tradition, Again
March 3, 2002

By Michelle Dulak

The Cypress Quartet's "Call & Response" series has made it in some ways the most interesting of the Bay Area's professional string quartets. It ties its commissions explicitly to programs containing older music; it elicits new works, but goes out of its way to connect them to older works. It acts, that is, as though there is a string-quartet tradition, as indeed there is. The quartet's latest program, Sunday at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, saw a new piece added to that tradition and two others in fine, though sometimes flawed, performances.

The original "Call & Response" concept combined a pair of closely-related pieces with a third newly-commissioned one. The first "Call & Response" pair was, I believe, Beethoven's Op. 132 and Mendelssohn's Op. 13; the pair on their recent CD was Mozart's K. 464 and Beethoven's Op. 18/5. In both of those pairs, the model and the modeling are obvious; but there aren't many more pairs like that in the quartet literature. (May I suggest Grieg and Debussy — although that might make for a rather overwrought program . . .)

In any event, Shostakovich's 11th Quartet and Britten's Third aren't an obvious "pair" in the sense of the other "Call & Response" programs. Indeed, the players hesitated, in their spoken introductions to the two quartets, even to suggest mutual influence, saying only that the composers were close friends despite the obstacles of language and country. They might have made a stronger case than that. The Britten's "Burlesque" is very obviously one of Shostakovich's parodic scherzos parodied over again. But Shostakovich drew from Britten too; I doubt whether his 14th Symphony would have been possible without the example of Britten's "Serenade" and "Nocturne," song cycles whose texts are also drawn (like the Shostakovich's) from many poetic sources, but unified by a single theme.

Beautiful, but easy

Neither piece reliably brought out the best in the Cypress Quartet. Indeed, the Cypress Quartet's "best" is curiously elusive; when it's there, you certainly do hear it, but you practically have to track it to its lair before you can experience it. The group's basic sound is clear, light, airy, and extremely attractive. The trouble is that they so seldom go beyond that. It's not only that they are reluctant to make ugly sounds (though there is that); it's that they use full-out playing as a species of very occasional special effect.

Not that the Cypress players don't play at full strength in places, of course. The "Burlesque" of the Britten, for example, was all anyone could possibly want (there was certainly no timidity in violist Ethan Filner's behind-the-bridge arpeggios!). But the really gutsy playing is too rare, and the pale-and-beautiful too common. Take the "Solo" third movement of the Britten. Cecily Ward's account of the perilous first-violin line was exquisite, fragile, balanced as if on a knife-edge. But then there is that extraordinary place in the middle of the movement where, if you will, all heaven breaks loose. And there that magnificent control and command seemed simply out of place, as though a classically-trained actor were present at Pentecost and wondering earnestly how to orate in tongues.

The remainder of the Britten was very fine, though I kept having the feeling that the players weren't getting enough sheer physical pleasure out of making sound. (The second-movement "Ostinato" suffered especially — the whole fun of the thing is the four-note ostinato recklessly careening through the quartet; why on earth play it down so much? It exists to be "obstinate" — and obnoxious.) The final passacaglia, though, was quite beautiful, played with such serenity that the steady, stealthy increase in its power was rather felt than heard.

A tiny whiff of a motto theme,
seven times over

Shostakovich's 11th Quartet is an odd puppy, even for Shostakovich — a whirlwind sequence of seven tiny movements all incorporating the same tiny whiff of a motto theme. It can take more exaggeration and savagery than the Cypress players were prepared to subject it to — in fact, it seemed a little starved of both — but there was some amazing playing, especially in the fourth movement with its whirling sixteenth notes, where Cecily Ward set a blistering pace and held to it even when the slurs gave way to separate bows.

Benjamin Lees' Fifth Quartet, which received its premiere Sunday, was meant to complement this particular program. It may well have complemented the program, in the sense of drawing on both Britten and Shostakovich and making their linkage clearer than it otherwise would have been. What is certain is that the program didn't complement it. In any context some listeners would be bound to feel that Lees' first two movements ran on too long for their own good, but after a first half containing two quartets and twelve movements (at an average timing of maybe three minutes a movement), Lees hardly stood a chance.

The piece really had some very attractive stuff in it. The first movement tussled in a Bartóky sort of way with two themes, both of them striking and interesting. The second, "Arioso," contained some truly marvelous music for the two violins in high, intertwined duets, sometimes taking on the cast of birdsong. (The composer, who was on hand for the premiere, explained that the movement was inspired by the sight of a pair of swallows in flight.)

A long, long theme; a skittering scherzo

But the middle of that same "Arioso" is taken up by a long, long octave-doubled melody, punctuated by little repeated notes from the other half of the quartet. Shostakovich could get away with such long, desolate stretches of music, but that's because they were really desolate — a solo line wandering as though in the wilderness. An octave-doubled line is not the same, especially in a string quartet.

The third movement is one of those skittering, shivering scherzos, con sordino, rather like the second movement of the Bartók Fourth Quartet or the third of Berg's Lyric Suite, though simpler and more schematic than either. And the fourth is based on a really new device — at least, I've never seen it used before. It's a fugue, but the subject and countersubject are so designed that each entry settles in on top of a seething pile of prior entries moving all in parallel. Ingenious, and fun, once you see what's going on and follow it.

A neat piece, then, but one perversely ill-served by the company it kept, which was the company it was designed to keep.

(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.)