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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
A Powerful Quartet, Driven From The Outsides
October 21, 2001
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By Michelle Dulak
I've lauded the Morrison Artists' Series at San Francisco State University before, but this seems a good time to do it again. I doubt that there is another free concert series in the entire country that consistently brings in such fine chamber ensembles, performing such interesting programs. The publicity for the series is on the lean side, but chamber-music lovers in the Bay Area have long since learned to keep an eye on it. Coming to the Mendelssohn Quartet's recital last Sunday with a friend who was particularly interested in Dutilleux's Ainsi la nuit, I ran into another friend (a fine new-music pianist) who was there for the same reason.
The Mendelssohn Quartet has acquired a new first violinist and violist since the only recording I've heard of it (which is pretty old), and their sound has changed a good deal. Quartets tend to be driven from the middle or the outsides, and the Mendelssohns are definitely in the "outer-driven" camp. Make that "cello-driven," as I've never heard a quartet cellist dominate an ensemble quite as much as Marcy Rosen does this one.
Many quartets might well wish for such leadership. Rosen is a powerhouse cellist, one with an impeccable technique and a soloist's force and swagger. There were places where she might have been a little more considerate to her colleagues, especially violist Ulrich Eichenauer, whose swath of registral territory tended to be overwhelmed by the waves of cello sound coming from just below.
In fact Eichenauer could put out impressively in his own right, as the audience discovered later on; but, whether through mutual agreement or from some other cause, both he and the second violinist, Nicholas Mann, lay low for most of the program. So the chief counterbalance was the leader, Miriam Fried, a violinist with a distinguished history as soloist and a distinctly suave personality as quartet-leader. The opener was Beethoven's A-major Quartet, Op. 18/5, and it saw neither Ms. Fried nor the quartet as a whole at their best. It's just possible to make Beethoven's metronome marks for the Op. 18 quartets work, but it means incredible sensitivity and, in particular, incredibly quick changes of tone and gesture. What you cannot do is take the Op. 18 you already know and have rehearsed, and just bump it up to Beethoven's maniacally-fast speeds. Whether the Mendelssohns were aiming deliberately for Beethoven's tempi I don't know, but their speeds in the outer movements certainly suggested it. The first movement (which was unfortunately the first thing we heard) was the worst: clipped, brusque, perfunctory. Add a dynamic range that didn't dip much below mezzo-forte, and you have pretty grim Beethoven.
Things improved rapidly from there. The finale may also have been a little faster than was good for it, but the tempo did far less damage; and the inner movements were well played. (Sometimes very well indeed — Rosen's thumping cello and Fried's frenetic trills were tremendous fun in the "oom-pah" variation of the slow movement.) But all in all, Beethoven just a little steroidal for my taste. Okay, sometimes Beethoven demands steroids, but not this gentle Beethovenian riff on one of Mozart's gentlest quartets, K. 464. The Mendelssohns seem to have been a little nervous about programming Dutilleux's Ainsi la nuit in this venue, and I can't entirely blame them; the last time a quartet tried Britten's Third Quartet here, I heard a woman sitting just behind me loudly demanding to know why anyone called such stuff "music" at all. In any event, they favored this piece (but not the other two) with a program note, and Ms. Rosen offered another apologia before the quartet sat down to play it. Ainsi la nuit (completed 1976) is about the closest thing we have to a late-twentieth-century quartet classic. As it happens, it falls very close in time to the other two obvious contenders, Britten's Third and Shostakovich's Fifteenth. But those are so clearly valedictory pieces that the Dutilleux has become the favorite "new-music" item of quartets that want to look hip but don't want to venture too far out on a limb.
I hasten to say that the Mendelssohn Quartet, which has commissioned quartets from several prominent composers, doesn't belong in that category. And Ainsi la nuit, for its part, deserves better than to be the late-twentieth-century plug-in on an up-and-coming quartet's repertoire list. Okay, the piece does give the impression that its composer was in the habit of going to bed with the Berg Lyric Suite tucked under his pillow. But there are worse influences for a quartet composer, and by now we've heard just about all of them. (More Berg fans, please.) The Mendelssohns were on top of the Dutilleux's atmospherics — its whirring, whispering, moaning voices — but the performance could've used some technical tightening-up. Too many things obviously meant to be simultaneous weren't, quite, and one or two octaves between parts were just a little narrower or wider than nature allows.
The impression of, shall we say, slapdashery carried on into the Brahms A-minor Quartet that took up the second half; but hey, Brahms is built for performances like this. Or at least he withstands them uncommonly well. There's enough motivic and rhythmic intricacy in a Brahms quartet to keep an alert musician busy for a very long time; but in fact you can blur half the details out and still have something sensuously irresistible. (It takes a peculiar talent to get yourself damned in your own lifetime both as a voluptuary and as a desiccated theoretician, as Brahms did. This is how he did it.) As a matter of fact the Mendelssohns' performance wasn't especially messy (except for the middle of the scherzo, which I'm inclined to blame on the difficulties of hearing across the stage in McKenna Theater). But it was not one of those "this is three against four, and before I'm done with it you'll know it, dammit" performances, either. It was passionate and joyous, and not incidentally a lot better balanced than the Beethoven had been. My friend described Eichenauer at intermission as "sounding as though he's under house arrest." Not in the last movement of the Brahms, he didn't.
(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©2001 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |