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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Salons? In San Francisco? December 6, 2001
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By Michelle Dulak
It's a marvelous idea, really. Here's a city teeming with people eager to hear good chamber music, and teeming likewise with young chamber ensembles dying to give concerts; and in the same city's downtown are grand old hotels that have largeish rooms tolerably well-suited to chamber music. One such is the Hotel Rex just off Union Square, and it's there that San Francisco Performances launched “Salons at the Rex,” a series of short concerts meant to bring space, audience, and musicians together.
On Thursday evening the performers were the Del Sol Quartet, a youngish string quartet (founded in 1992) that has spent some time apprenticed to San Francisco State's Alexander Quartet. Once the room had filled up (there were maybe eighty seats), the quartet filed in, sat down, and launched immediately into a gutsy performance of Astor Piazzolla's “Libertango.” Only afterwards did founding violist Charlton Lee stand up and introduce himself, the other players, and the piece. But for the rest of the recital, every piece got a spoken introduction from one of the players.
The program the Del Sols had assembled was titled “Music from the Americas,” and it was about as fine and unhackneyed a survey of pan-American quartet music as anyone could fit into an hour. South America was represented by the Argentine composers Astor Piazzolla and Alberto Ginastera; Mexico by Silvestre Revueltas; the United States by Ruth Crawford Seeger and John Harbison; and Canada by the young Bay Area-based composer Ronald Bruce Smith, who was in attendance. If it was a pity to see several movements yanked out of their context in larger works, the choices were nonetheless canny: an impish fugal movement from Harbison's Quartet No. 2, a “Libero e rapsodico” from Ginastera's Quartet No. 2 that fully lived up to its title, and the extraordinary “Andante” from Ruth Crawford Seeger's 1931 Quartet, with its mysterious, tidally-shifting harmonies. (There is some precedent for excerpting that movement; I seem to recall that the composer herself arranged it for string orchestra.)
a deft Canadian “Libertango” itself was not originally for string quartet, but was arranged for the medium by the fine Bay Area jazz violinist Jeremy Cohen. The Revueltas was his engagingly raucous one-movement Fourth Quartet, titled Musica de feria (meaning roughly “Festival Music,” not — pace violinist Aenea Keyes, who introduced it — “Music of the Fair,” which to a California audience conjures up images of Ferris wheels and livestock judging). And Smith's contribution was a movement from a work-in-progress titled Nostalgia, a scampering moto perpetuo scherzo from which emerge, briefly, fragments of the Scherzo of the Ravel Quartet. It was “neat” music in the best sense — artful, beautifully put together, and fascinating to the ear. I look forward eagerly to the rest of the piece. A marvelous lineup, then, and one that obviously didn't just happen by accident; the players' introductions to the six pieces were thoughtful and knowledgeable, and they had clearly arranged the program with care. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the actual playing. For so experienced a quartet, ensemble and intonation were disconcertingly scatty, and tempo judgment not what it might be. When the Ravel quotation turned up in the Smith, it was at roughly two-thirds the tempo of the original. I asked the composer afterwards if that was the tempo he wanted, and he confirmed that it ought to be “a little faster.” (Like, maybe fifty percent?)
The player who made the greatest impression was violist Charlton Lee, whose powerful sound was a striking presence throughout. In “Libertango” it was his vigorous, almost brutal viola ostinato, not the actual tune, that stuck in the memory. But that was owing as much to the violins' reticence as to Lee's projection. Kathryn Stenberg, who led the Piazzolla, has a pure, slender sound that can be very beautiful, but smoldering sensuality is, to say no more, not really her natural affect. (I'm afraid I kept wishing for Jeremy Cohen.) Aenea Keyes, the other violinist, has a more vibrant sound and greater power, but she too was too recessive much of the time, even when leading. Neither seemed tonally a match for Lee or for cellist Randolph Fromme, whose unobtrusive security and strength were great assets. I don't think any of the players were helped much by the room, which is ideal in size and shape for chamber music, but thickly carpeted. I suspect it isn't particularly friendly to string instruments. Upcoming recitals in the series (they include percussionist Stefon Harris and the fine baritone Christópheren Nomura) may fare better in the Rex's acoustic. (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 |
