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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Intense and Grim
November 30, 2001
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 By Nikki Buechler
Whether it was the reputation of the Emerson String Quartet, the promise of hearing some of the best chamber music of the twentieth century, or a combination of these factors, the Emerson sold every seat at Stanford University's Dinkelspiel Auditorium. Before and after Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 5, the first work on the program, there was something in the air; the audience was excited and restless.
Dimitri Shostakovich's music is not generally known for being cheerful and optimistic, but his String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat Minor, op. 144 is forty minutes of intense and relentless adagio. I felt that the short intermission was insufficient to allow myself to prepare for the experience I was about to undergo. Agitation in the audience, tangible at the beginning of the concert, was not resolved as we took our seats.
After the lights dimmed, the Emerson did not wait for complete silence before they commenced playing. Audience noise, including a ringing cell phone, acted as a barrier preventing total and immediate engagement with the work. By the second movement, the atmosphere began to match the mood created by the quartet.
Despite being a connected succession of adagios, the Shostakovich Fifteenth is not warm and intimate, but dark and distant, taking the listener on a long journey to unfamiliar places. After the concert, for the remainder of the evening, I felt affected by my experience; not unlike the way a powerful dream will resonate throughout the day. For the listener, the Bartók Fifth offers a great deal of variety in texture, instrumentation, motivic treatment and tonality. For the players, it is technically challenging. At times, especially in the fourth movement where the Emerson played ricochet motifs simultaneously, with casual brilliance, they seemed to be showing off. The Bartók is varied and vivacious, a style of composition that perfectly compliments the Emerson Quartet. Several times I couldn't keep from grinning at the players' incongruous combination of nonchalance and technical brilliance.
The Emerson sat fairly far apart from each other, and other than violist Lawrence Dutton, none of them moved around much. They seemed to be having intense encounters with their own instruments, but not with each other. They all sat back in their chairs. They watched each other, but it was peripheral; in general they seemed quite reserved and often unengaged. This worked in their favor, though: when an individual player physically dramatized a passage, the impact was all the more affecting, as was the case in the fifth movement of the Bartók, when Philip Setzer, on second violin, played one of his folk-song based solos in the manner of an amateur (complete with scratchy sound, uncertain intonation and a smirk). It was a humorous and unexpected indulgence. When the group moved toward each other and gestured with their instruments to embellish something, as they did with dramatic endings, the effect was outstanding. This group does not force itself to make abundant and indiscriminate gestures that do not enhance the music. The violinists switched chairs for the Shostakovich, and the quartet moved even farther away from each other than they had been before. It seemed impossible that they would be able to play together sitting that far apart, but their decision to spread out helped accentuate the contrapuntal and austere character of the music, and they lost none of their ensemble.
Here, the players' reserved demeanors perfectly suited the atmosphere of the music, and the violinists' exchange of seats worked in their favor.. Philip Setzer is less exuberant than Eugene Drucker, and the latter seemed to suffer from "second violinist syndrome" when moved to the second chair. This meant that the violin section became more subdued than they had been in the Bartók, and Lawrence Dutton was again the most active player. Given the importance of the viola throughout this piece (and much of Shostakovich's music generally), the movement of the violist did not upset the balance as one might have expected. About a quarter of the audience gave the group a standing ovation following the incredibly intense concert. There was no encore, a fact that left me with mixed feelings. An encore would have offered welcome distraction from the intensity of what we had just heard, but there is nothing that would have been appropriate to follow the Shostakovich. (Nikki Buechler is a PhD student at the music department at Stanford University. She has a Master's degree from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and spent 5 years working as a viola player in chamber groups, orchestras and as an occasional soloist in London, England.) ©2001 Nikki Buechler, all rights reserved |