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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Dunsmuir Piano Quartet
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By William Wellborn
It was like old home week at the San Francisco Conservatory Sunday as the Dunsmuir Piano Quartet was greeted by a welcoming crowd in Hellman Hall. The ensemble, founded in 1987, is well known to Bay Area audiences, and with good reason. Panist Justin Blasdale, violinist Margaret Batjer (who recently joined the quartet), violist Roxann Jacobson, and cellist Jennifer Culp play with a fervor and commitment coupled with a superb sense of ensemble.
The program, a grateful mixture of lesser-known and familiar works, opened with Franz Schubert's relatively unfamiliar "Adagio and Rondo in F Major" for piano and strings. The piano part which leads, is reminiscent of the virtuoso music of Weber, Clementi and Hummel. Blasdale played it with style and flair that was often dazzling but never vulgar. The strings provided a strong, almost orchestral accompaniment to the brilliant concertante piano flourishes.
In a completely different vein was Aaron Copland's "Quartet for Piano and Strings," an austere yet beautiful work written in the summer of 1950. The work is in three movements, but not in the usual plan of fast-slow-fast; instead, a lively middle movement framed by a pair of slow movements, serious in character. The first movement begins with hymn-like solemnity, and it was here that the strings did the most impressive playng of the afternoon. Although on occasion violinist Batjer started some pitches a little too low for comfort, the sense of line and phrase was noteworthy and was answered perfectly by Jacobson and Culp. Here there was such a remarkable blend of strings that it seemed as if only one instrument were playing.
In contrast to this powerful movement, the second was a lively and rhythmic dialogue, each of the players tossing the material back and forth with ease and precision. Perhaps only Aaron Copland could write a serious composition with material derived from "Three Blind Mice" combined with that from a spiritual, the sources of the closing movement. The quartet's performance of it was marked by a moving balance of introspection and poignancy.
After intermission came the first and most popular of Brahms' three Piano Quartets, the G Minor," op. 25. Clara Schumann was the pianist at its premiere in Hamburg on November 16, 1861. The Dunsmuir brought its dark and brooding qualities to the forefront. If one sometimes wished for a more typically Brahmsian lushness of sound (particularly from the strings), the performance did proceed with a sense of structure that was compelling and often gripping. The Dunsmuir played the fiery, Gypsy element in the final "Rondo alla Zingarese" to the hilt, eliciting cheering applause at the concert's conclusion.
(Pianist William Wellborn performs and lectures in the United States and Europe, and from 1995-97 was host of the program "Piano Legacy" on San Francisco station KDFC. Wellborn is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory, where he teaches courses in piano, piano history, and opera.)
©1998 William Wellborn, all rights reserved
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