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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW Selected Short Subjects, for Quartet September 29, 2002
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By Arman Schwartz
Although the Ives String Quartet devoted less then two minutes of their Sunday afternoon concert to the music of their namesake, the spirit of the American composer was clearly felt in the eclectic style of their program. Rare for a string quartet recital, the performance — which took place last Sunday at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, in Berkeley — was devoted entirely to short pieces, nineteenth and twentieth century works by composers both eminent and obscure. While the playing of the quartet was often highly accomplished, the concert's true pleasure came from the unexpected connections listeners could make between remarkably diverse works.
The concert began and ended with little known works by American composers: Arthur Foote's Theme and Variations (the only published movement of a complete string quartet) and three of William Kroll's short Character Pieces. Both compositions are written in relatively conservative idioms, the former recalling chamber music by both Schubert and Dvorak, the later relying on somewhat dated caricatures of Eastern European folk music traditions. These pieces brought out the strengths of the players who contributed a lovely dark tone to the slower of Foote's variations and made much of the virtuoso turns and delicate textures of Kroll's studies.
The same skills contributed to the compelling performance of Dvorak's Cypresses and, especially, of Schubert's Quartetsatz, by far the most complex work on the program. Taking Schubert's single movement piece at an especially fast tempo, the Ives Quartet made much of its dramatic textural and thematic contrasts.
Other moments in the concert were, however, less convincing. Puccini's slight Crisantemi was played with what seemed like little enthusiasm, and Webern's Langsamer Satz suffered in balance and coordination.
As for the Ives: his tiny “Scherzo,” subtitled Holding Your Own, is a bizarre and delightful piece. The outer sections combine popular songs with aggressively dissonant writing and contrast with a surprisingly lyrical central episode that involves little more than an ascending scale. Heard in the context of conservative Americans like Foote and Kroll, and more Romantic modernists like Webern, the uniqueness of Ives' voice resounded all the more clearly. The concert will be repeated on November 9 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and on November 10 at the San Jose Museum of Art.
(Arman Schwartz is a graduate student in music at the University of California, Berkeley.)
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Ives Quartet