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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Imaginative, Detailed Quartet Playing
October 27, 2002
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By John Lutterman
In a review of the Takacs Quartet at Zellerbach Hall two weeks ago I
lamented the practice of presenting chamber music concerts in large halls. While necessary for the large audience needed to recover the fees the leading ensembles command, such auditoria can produce disappointing acoustical results and performers may have to sacrifice some subtlety in order to be heard. At Sunday night's concert in the Berkeley Art Center, the situation was almost exactly the opposite. The audience was rather small (perhaps the final game of the World Series had something to do with this), but in this wonderful chamber music venue, the sound was resonant but clear.
Before then, I had not heard the Jupiter Quartet, comprised of local symphony and free-lance musicians and formed in 1997. I was very pleasantly surprised. These were imaginative, thoughtful performances, and showed great attention to detail — details which would have been lost in a larger hall.
Alexander Glazunov's seventh Quartet in C, Op. 107 of 1930 was another pleasant
surprise. Apart from some wind music — he wrote a saxophone quartet that figures prominently in the rather meager repertoire of that undeservedly neglected instrument — I know little of Glazunov's chamber music. Glazunov was a child prodigy who received a first rate
education as a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. In Russia he is credited with
having reconciled the nationalist concerns of the "mighty five" with the
Western European classical tradition. A dedicated teacher and director
of the St. Petersburg Conservatory for most of the first third of the
twentieth century, he had an great impact on the training and outlook of
many important Russian musicians, but his compositions have often been
disparaged as "academic."
The seventh quartet is a genial work, each of its four movements bearing a programmatic title. The first, the "Homage to the Past," evokes the imitative textures of Renaissance music for viol consort. The Jupiter musicians had an imaginative way of projecting this character. The way they handled their bows, the lack of vibrato and the thoughtfully worked out intonation were compelling. Folk idioms pop up frequently in the rest of the quartet, but Glazunov treats them in a neoclassic manner that recalls the work of some of his French contemporaries — the long, flowing, seamless phrases of Faure's late chamber music often came to mind. Given a less sensitive performance, the work could seem rather static. This is not dramatic, forward-driving music. Its virtues lie rather in the subtle use of texture and color to create a series of tableaus. These colors and textures were thoughtfully realized and a pleasure to savor in such a friendly acoustical environment. The second half of the program was devoted to Beethoven's E flat Major Quartet, Op. 127, the first of the composer's six late quartets. In a conventional four-movement form, this work is full of the unexpected twists and turns, the stark contrasts, and the formal experimentation typical of late Beethoven. The quartet begins and ends with movements concerned primarily with slow, reflective ideas, and the dramatic high point is achieved in the second movement, an Adagio cast as a set of variations. As a result, an effective performance demands particularly careful pacing.
The Jupiter Quartet seemed somewhat less at home in the Beethoven. As in the Glazunov, the ensemble playing showed great attention to intonation and unified color, but I found myself wishing that they would treat the twists and turns with more of a sense of drama, wit and humor. Though first violinist Viktor Romasevich is an imaginative, dynamic leader and his partners responded faithfully, at times it seemed that they needed to be more assertive, particularly as the thematic material in this work is so democratically distributed. Still, this was sensitive, thoughtful playing. The quartet — Romasevich and Michael Jones, violins, Stephen Levintow, viola, Paul Rhodes, cello — certainly deserves a wider audience. Their current residency at the Berkeley Art Center provides an all too rare opportunity to hear chamber music in a congenial setting. (John Lutterman is a cellist and musicologist. He holds a DMA from SUNY Stony Brook and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in historical musicology at UC Davis. ) ©2002 John Lutterman, all rights reserved |