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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Guarneri's Brahms, In The Right Place
October 21, 1999
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By Michelle Dulak
Thursday's appearance of the Guarneri Quartet at Herbst Theater is likely the last the Bay Area will ever see of the quartet in its original membership. The Quartet is not disbanding, but its senior member, cellist David Soyer, has decided to bow out of future tours. When the group ventures outside of the East Coast in future, it will be with a guest cellist.
An intense, weighty, and imposing sound has always been one of the Guarneri's hallmarks, but Thursday's performance suggested a quartet bent on preserving that sound-image at the expense of anything or everything else. The collective tone, at least at moderate dynamic levels, was indeed marvelous--plush, vibrant, and well-weighted from top to bottom. But it didn't survive when the Quartet tried to push it to levels above forte; the violins sounded over-pressured and the cello buried. And the marvelous tone came at a high interpretive price.
Mozart's G-major Quartet, K. 387, was an unfortunate choice to open the concert. The Guarneri manner is not particularly congenial to Mozart in any case, but this work--with its lightning-quick shifts of motive and dynamic--is the mature Mozart quartet least compatible with the Guarneris' particular set of strengths and weaknesses. The whole piece was stodgy and under-characterized. Mozart's unusually detailed dynamics were underplayed, with the several pianissimos in the first movement (for example) rather louder than a judicious piano. Apart from the last movement, tempos were on the slow side, but they seemed yet slower with the Guarneris' earnest attempts to wring the last ounce of sound (or the last wriggle of vibrato) out of even the least significant notes. Almost nowhere was there a clear, clean, straightforward physical gesture, let alone the exchange of gestures among parts that is the real point of chamber music.
K. 387's minuet, with its slithering, cross-accented chromatic scales, is one of Mozart's more annoying creations even in the best performance. The Guarneris' version had not even the elemental pleasure of the grotesque. Sluggish and rhythmically wayward, with the hemiola sforzandi in the chromatic scales sometimes barely distinguishable from the normal ebb and flow of the players' vibratos, the minuet seemed to last a long time. (One was conscious of the observance of all the repeats, all the more so since the Guarneris had skipped the exposition repeat in the first movement.)
The slow movement, it must be said, had one moment of arresting beauty. At one point midway through the movement, the music suddenly and unexpectedly drops into the far-distant key of D-flat, and here the Guarneris dropped to a true and breathtaking pianissimo that made one feel more keenly the missed opportunities in the first movement. The finale scampered along at the right pace, but with a dogged kind of energy that prevented its really taking off.
Zoltán Kodály's Second Quartet, which followed, meshed better with the Guarneris' gifts. The music weds a harmonic language straight out of Debussy's G-minor Quartet with themes and fragments suggestive of folk music, much like early Bartók. The weight and sonority of the Guarneris' sound were a positive pleasure in the more luxuriant passages, and John Dalley's bright and incisive sound brought unexpected power to Kodály's tough second violin part.
Still, the Guarneris' insistence on depth and weight of sound at all times ultimately dragged the performance down. The Kodály is in two movements, the second and (much) longer a kind of inchoate rondo, veering unpredictably among a number of independent folk-like themes. In cold fact it is a pretty repetitive piece, and moreover one that has all too many opportunities in it for over-excitement and overplaying. Handled intelligently, it is music that "works," but it takes careful attention to the overall trajectory and a wide range of tone color. Quartets as different as the Hollywood and the Hagen have achieved that, but the Guarneri didn't; they didn't dare a wide enough range of vibratos or dynamics, and they habitually sat back where they might have pressed forward. Once again, I found myself all too aware of the movement's length and thinness of material.
All was forgiven, though, after the Brahms G-major Viola Quintet, Op. 111, in which the Guarneris were joined by Ida Kavafian. Not that the performance was flawless; in fact, the demands of the music drove the violinists and the cellist repeatedly to overplaying, resulting in a kind of squashed violin sound and in a pitiful disproportion between effort and result in the cello. But the performance's heart was in the right place, which was the viola section. Kavafian is one of the very few eminent violinists who sound thoroughly at home on the viola. She took the lower part, playing so as to bring out details that I, long in love with this piece, have never heard before. Michael Tree, the Guarneri's violist, has an instrument a good inch larger than hers, judging by eye, but she held her own throughout; the two of them together made a magnificent sound, the sound a friend of mine calls "rich, creamy viola goodness." The Brahms found the Guarneri's playing with a true chamber-musical regard to one another's parts that, for some reason, hadn't been there earlier. The gentle coda of the first movement, with motives slipping easily from player to player, and the second movement's viola cadenza (played by Tree, with mellow tone and flexible rhythm) were finely done. But appropriately enough, it was the coda of the last movement that raised the roof. Brahms, having led the quintet and the audience far astray into remote B major, suddenly drops back into the home key of G with a break-neck czardás; the Guarneris and Kavafian, taking their lead from John Dalley's energetic whoop of a quadruple-stop, chased each other all the way home. It was enough fun for two concerts, at least. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |
