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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
October 12, 2003
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By Michelle Dulak
It is strange to find a much-anticipated debut happening almost unheralded on a free concert series at a
second-tier public university, but the Morrison Artists Series has a habit of bringing in the very best,
and they certainly did so last Sunday at San Francisco State's McKenna Theater.
For a certain sort of obsessed string-quartet nut, the question for the last year and a half has been
"Where's Kopelman"? Mikhail Kopelman was the first violinist of the Borodin Quartet for twenty years or
so, and after that the first of the Tokyo Quartet, until he left the latter group in 2002. What he was
going to do next he left unsaid. Now we know.
The Kopelman Quartet was founded in June of 2002 — that is to say, just after Kopelman left the
Tokyo. The name might suggest one of those nineteenth-century quartets comprising one virtuoso and three
accompanists. Sunday's performance did leave the impression of one-plus-three, but the balance of power
was nothing like so lopsided as that. The other Kopelman Quartet players turn out to be classmates of
his from the Moscow Conservatory, and prominent chamber players in their own rights. Second violinist
Boris Kuschnir and violist Igor Sulyga were both founding members of the Moscow Quartet, while cellist
Mikhail Milman spent twenty years as principal cello of the Moscow Virtuosi.
If Sunday's concert was a fair representation of the group, they ought to be one of the top quartets in the world in a year or two if they manage to stick together. Right now they aren't, quite — mainly, I think, because they don't know one another well enough. Little insecurities of ensemble and intonation were pervasive — most noticeably between Kopelman and the other three, though also among the lower players. Kopelman in particular was careless about rhythm and tempo to a degree unsettling in a quartet player, roaring through the turbulent slurred sextuplets in the Schubert Quartettsatz so recklessly that Sulyga shot him a bemused look the second time round, and playing the sixteenths in the first slow-movement variation of the same composer's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet exactly like the triplets underneath. On the other hand, if you wanted to put together a grand Russian quartet, you could hardly have better raw materials. Kopelman himself is something of a legend among chamber music lovers — a player with the chops of a soloist who nonetheless went the chamber-music route. On Sunday the immaculate technique wasn't quite literally spotless; there was some dodgy intonation and even a few muffed bowstrokes (which coming from Kopelman really is a surprise). But that amazing, rich, honey-sweet, dense violin sound is there as ever. It's a sound unlike any one else's, which of course poses something of a challenge when putting together a string quartet around it. Kuschnir is about the best imaginable second — just as powerful as Kopelman and with a similar sound-ideal, just a little brighter and tauter. The lower strings are of a different but equally Russian type, lithe and sinewy and intense.
It looks like a mismatch on paper, but at its best on Sunday it was very heaven. Both Schubert quartets had their shaky moments (and some rather more than shaky), but when the Kopelmans were good they were breathtakingly good. The quiet places were unbelievably well controlled (I'm thinking of the end of the "Death and the Maiden" slow movement, and of parts of the Quartettsatz), while the fiercer bits got a "take-no-prisoners" treatment that I don't think many quartets would dare. In between was a sort of rich lyricism that I've not encountered often anywhere. The trio of "Death and the Maiden's" scherzo was pure bliss. In the Schubert quartets this all had to be weighed against instances of sloppy ensemble and inconveniently wide (or narrow) octaves and the like. I wouldn't want to subject the performance of Shostakovich's Third Quartet to an exacting intonational inspection either, but it was playing of a different order. The piece is from 1946, which was in the USSR a time of post-war jubilation and also of extreme hardship. Perhaps that explains the weirdly mercurial nature of this strange quartet, which veers from jocular to tragic to merely brutal to flippant with bewildering speed. (There is a particularly disorienting recapitulation in the first movement, where about three minutes of sustained mayhem suddenly resolves back into the jaunty opening theme as though nothing had ever gone wrong in the first place. The Kopelmans played it with a sly little ritardando so natural and unanimous that I suspect it of being a Russian performance tradition, the sort of thing you hear growing up with a piece and just internalize.) The Shostakovich was certainly a fine test-piece for the Kopelmans; we now know that they can do jocular and tragic and brutal and flippant, and much else besides. The slow movement — a passacaglia in whose opening bars Kopelman's plaintive soliloquy sounded touchingly vulnerable opposite the implacable lower three strings — might have been the best of the performance, but that the kaleidoscopic finale that followed it was also phenomenal. The closing bars, with Kopelman once again declaiming quietly over an incredibly calm and perfectly-balanced string-trio backdrop, were such as to stop the breath. The encore was also Shostakovich: the first movement of his First Quartet, played deftly and, at its end, with such blissful repose that the audience took the hint: "No more now; let's all to bed."
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written
about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York
Times.)
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