San Francisco Classical Voice

I'm not sure how Marlboro's touring ensembles are assembled, but Sunday's program included five string players, and only one of them is not a member of an active string quartet. (And she, Hiroko Yajima, is the one "senior" member of this crew, the head of the String Department at Mannes School of Music, which would seem to suggest that she has even less free time). All the serious young string quartets I've ever heard of rehearse incessantly, every day. Taking weeks off to tour with what audiences will inevitably see as an ad hoc ensemble looks like a substantial sacrifice. But dedicated chamber music players are an intense lot, and playing chamber music on the Marlboro level must be an intense experience. Of such things lifetime loyalties are made.

Not everything worked well in Sunday's concert. Haydn's Quartet Op. 20, No. 2 was a good choice in many ways for an occasional group like this — lush in texture, lush in melody, offering opportunities to everyone. But the strange rhetoric of 1770s Haydn isn't an easy thing to pick up. The Marlboro players (Min-Young Kim and Yajima, violins; Sang-Jin Kim, viola; and Nicholas Tsavaras, cello) got the lushness, all right, but in places I wondered whether they understood why one thing followed another. Case in point: the minuet ends with the same figure of a grace note and three eighths that begins the trio a second afterward. Tsavaras didn't sound like he was connecting the trio to the minuet; he didn't sound like he was connecting anything to anything. He sounded like a man who suddenly had a solo to play. It was very beautifully played, all right, but alarmingly aloof from the other players who had practically given him his cue, in the drama that is a Haydn quartet.

That said, Min-Young Kim was ravishing in the aria part of the slow movement; Tsavaras himself has an amazing and beautiful cello sound; and the finale — really sotto voce, as written — scampered and sizzled. The fun of tracking all those diminutive quartet voices through their peregrinations, and bracing oneself for the communal forte towards the end, is what chamber music is for.

Hindemith's Clarinet Quintet is his Op. 30, which for Hindemith fans will place it immediately — towards the end of his rowdy period, when (to paraphrase Richard Taruskin, writing in Opus many years ago) "the smell of rosin dust rises from the score," and decorum had not yet set in. Hindemith in the mid-20s (the Quintet was premiered in 1923) was maybe a little casual as a composer, but he obviously had a lot of fun composing. This Quintet, for example, with its outer movements exact palindromes of one another — in another composer there would be some accursed theory behind a move like that; in Hindemith (Hindemith of the 20s, anyhow) it's just a composer playing with music, like a sculptor playing with clay. Those raucous outer movements enclose a pair of very quiet slow movements (one densely contrapuntal, one a first-violin soliloquy), and between them a wicked parody of a Ländler, in which the clarinetist switches to the shrill E-flat clarinet.

The Marlboro clarinetist, Israeli-born Alexander Fiterstein, was mellow-toned, agile, and (when necessary) piercingly loud, and his colleagues (the same team as the Haydn, except that the violist was Brian Chen) didn't miss a trick. Chen's effortless sextuplets in the outer movements and Kim's sultry fourth-movement portamenti were among the highlights.

But it was the Mendelssohn that made the concert. Mendelssohn's second string quintet, Op. 87, is one of those late pieces of his that is always being written off — too facile, themes too reminiscent of other Mendelssohn pieces, textures too busy. In short, the music of a has-been who's now a hack.

What I want to say is "It's all a lie!" Of course, it's more like a misunderstanding. All the later Mendelssohn chamber music is magnificently designed — to be played. Those bustly, incessantly-busy textures, for example, are interpreted as attempts to make a few players sound like an orchestra. They may do that in practice, but I think the real point is to get everyone playing in on the fun, even when they aren't carrying the tune. The density of harmony is the same thing — a way of bringing in a whole ensemble such that everyone has a place to come out. It makes a thundering great noise from outside, but it's designed to be enjoyed from inside.

The Marlboro players took their enjoyment with gusto, and the sheer exuberance of it flowed over into the audience. The violin playing alone would have made the whole concert by itself. Yajima was playing first this time, Min-Young Kim second, and both played as though they were playing the first violin part in the Mendelssohn Octet, which was as it should be.

The dueling violas (Sang-Jin Kim first, Brian Chen second) were almost better. Their duets were luscious, their trading-off in the development sections almost vicious (I remember one passage of imitation in the last movement in which the two violins had their say and then the first viola weighed in startlingly as though to say "And now for the real stuff!"). And in the one place they actually joined up in unison (towards the end of the finale), their combined force was enough to knock a delicate listener out of his seat. (Kim's wry little grins just prior to each assault added to the fun.) As for cellist Tzavaras, he's a different kind of player from the other four, with an airy tone rather than a dense one, and a delicate, almost mincing sense of phrasing. But the guy can make an enormous sound, and he "underwrote" the Mendelssohn in a big way.

It was big, brilliant playing, but homely, not the kind that makes you think "Gosh, how exquisite," but the kind that makes you think "Man, I want to play that piece again." Which means it was exactly right.

(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.)

©2002 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved