San Francisco Classical Voice

CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW

Odd Sandwich

January 26, 2005

Daedalus Quartet

By David A. Lawrence

In its appearance at Stanford on Wednesday, the Daedalus Quartet guarded György Ligeti's String Quartet No. 2 on both sides with quartets by Schubert, so that the Ligeti couldn't get loose and stir up trouble. It was a strange approach to program-building: for the first half of the evening, it meant pairing Ligeti with Schubert's relatively early Quartettsatz — two pieces that have absolutely nothing in common, and hence shed no light on each other. They don't even work as an exercise in contrast, since they start from entirely separate aesthetic premises.

Bela Bartók is prominent in the Daedalus's repertoire, and any one of the six Bartók quartets would have provided a more appropriate choice than the Schubert, giving the opening half of the concert some additional gravitas. More importantly, Bartók forms, both literally and figuratively, the ground from which Ligeti's music springs. By the time this quartet was written, Ligeti had abandoned Hungary and taken up Austrian citizenship. Nonetheless, the Bartokian roots are there, so those two composers would have provided an interesting study in contrasts.

There was also some spin in the air in terms of promoting the Ligeti as the centerpiece of the evening, a distinction that clearly belonged to Schubert's immense Quartet in G, Opus 161, on the second half of the program. For instance, in his program notes, Keith Horner writes "Ligeti's String Quartet No. 2 is one of the landmark works not only of Ligeti's output but, indeed, of the quartet repertoire of the last century." He goes on to describe several of the movements as "nightmarish," and exploring "a world of terror and horror."

Taking the bait

Well, first of all, the quartet is more quirky than it is substantial. And, secondly, Horner has been hoodwinked by Ligeti's notorious sense of humor. Just as Ravel wrote that La valse was about the grandeur of Vienna (which it most certainly is not), composers are sometimes inclined to toy with their annotators and listeners regarding the programmatic content of their works. It's in the spirit of, "Let them figure it out for themselves."

The Ligeti is, in fact, mostly fun and games. A whirlwind of many different approaches to composition makes an appearance and then is quickly dispatched, vaudeville-style, so that the next act can announce itself. The piece includes microtonal writing, insanely-complex polyrhythms that morph into unmetered music, imitations of electronically-generated sounds, non-traditional use of the instruments, some neo-Bartók, and the drearily-ubiquitous post-Webernian atonality that was required of academic compositions in the 1960s. All of this happens within the space of five very slender movements, a couple of which are quite tiny. The net effect is of a crazy-quilt collage of modern techniques; only the final movement is stylistically coherent, in its evocation of the mysterious atmospheres of the composer's more famous pieces, such as Lux Aeterna and Requiem.

In introducing the music from the stage, violinist Min-Young Kim remarked on how attractive this score always seems to be to children. No doubt this is true: children have a short attention span, and they recognize a good romp when they hear one. It would be somewhat more important to know whether it's always attractive to adults.

Mode altering

In the discussion after the concert, a gentleman in the audience admitted that he couldn't remember if Schubert's magnificent Opus 161 is in G major or minor. He can be forgiven: it's in both. Schubert's lifelong fascination with coloring each of the modes with the inflections of the other reaches the level, in this culminating work, of a philosophical debate. The startling juxtapositions of modes, along with some extremely unusual textures, take this quartet to regions almost as remote as the quartets Beethoven was writing in Vienna in this same year (1826). Nonetheless, the overridingly genial melodic impulse of Viennese Classicism never disappears in Schubert's music, the way it sometimes does in late Beethoven. Most of Schubert's great works juxtapose melodic elegance with some form of conflictual or dark-hued message, and that is never more true than in this quartet.

As to the performances, the Daedalus has that quality of youthful earnestness and devotion to the task that the best young groups have, but these four players are especially fine. The ensemble is meticulous, and their chamber music consciousness is absolutely perfect. None of the four ever calls attention to himself, even in those moments when they own the melodic spotlight. It's really remarkable to watch.

That said, I wanted the entire Schubert quartet to be one dynamic level higher than it was. Part of this may simply be that Dinkelspiel Auditorium has an unfortunate way of eating up sound. But most of it seemed to be a conscious choice on the part of the players to stay refined and subdued. This involved a bit of bad timing for me, since I had just come from viewing a video of Oistrakh and Rostropovich — those two great Russian bears — snarling at each other as they dug into the finale of the Brahms Double Concerto; the atmosphere was so intense I thought the stage was going to explode.

Now of course that comparison is unfair to the Daedalus youngsters, but it makes the point that there really is such a thing as the theater of performance. If there weren't, we could all just stay home and listen to our CDs. On the other hand, Barry Shiffman of the St. Lawrence Quartet described the Daedalus group's playing as evidencing "European sophistication." That's an interesting remark; he means that restrained playing can be viewed as a virtue, and that not every good performance needs to have an edge. Naturally it would depend on what part of the repertoire you're talking about, but it's an issue on which reasonable people could disagree.