San Francisco Classical Voice

Bay Area quartet fans know the Miami Quartet, if at all, only through their excellent recent recording of the quartets of Saint-Sa”ns and Fauré. The quartet's Sunday recital, on San Francisco State University's admirable Morrison Artists' Series, confirmed the impression formed by that recording: this is an ensemble to watch.

It is a quartet with an odd internal balance. Second violinist Cathy Meng Robinson has a striking instrumental personality, darker and more intense than that of the first violinist, Ivan Chan. Her power and passion repeatedly startled me. The violist, Chauncey Patterson, has a mellow and unusually sweet tone. He ran some risk of being overpowered by the fourth member, cellist Keith Robinson, who with his forceful sound and manner often seemed the dominant voice of the quartet. The balance between the lower strings was not helped by the quartet's preferred seating, with the cello inside, facing the audience, while the viola (on the outside) projected toward the back of the stage.

The Miami's corporate sound is full and rich, and its ensemble near-flawless. Unison attacks and rhythms were played with unfailing precision. Intonation, too, was reliably excellent.

The one familiar work on the all-twentieth-century program was Barber's String Quartet, Op. 11, better known as the source of the famous "Adagio for Strings" than as a complete work. Indeed the "Adagio" is perhaps the only string orchestra work poached from the quartet repertory that really does work better in the expanded form. An orchestra can, with staggered bow-changes, render the long lines without the agonizing control of bow that a quartet must endure. Orchestral strings can vibrate as intensely as they want without the amplitude of the vibrato compromising the integrity of the pitch.

Faced with the unhelpful competition of the orchestral version, quartets have two strategies open to them in reclaiming the "Adagio." One possible approach emphasizes the austerity and even asceticism of the music, drawing attention to the spareness of the counterpoint with a sound almost like a consort of viols, vibrato kept to a bare minimum. The other tries to encompass the full passion of an orchestral performance with only four instruments.

The Miami Quartet opted decisively for the second path, and in the process illustrated a few of its pitfalls. They succeeded amazingly well in retaining their ripe collective tone under the cruel bowing constraints of the music, but even so, the strain was evident. Further, their thick vibrato (abetted by heavy portamenti as the music neared its climax) sometimes clouded the counterpoint. Where the viola takes up the bass line, often it was simply not powerful enough to anchor the overwrought playing above it.

Still, this was an effective performance. The framing outer movements (really a single movement, which returns in abbreviated form after the "Adagio") were deftly played, with precision and even humor, but were unavoidably overshadowed by the masterpiece sandwiched between them.

The presence on the program of two quartets written within the last decade might have alarmed some of the Morrison Series' patrons. In the event, though, they needn't have worried. I mean no disrespect to either composer in assigning both works, despite their quite different styles, to the burgeoning category of "friendly modernism."

New York-based composer Bruce Adolphe's fourth quartet, subtitled "Whispers of Mortality" and written for the Miami Quartet, proved to be a lucid and elegantly-designed work with a mild harmonic vocabulary and a graceful mien. Adolphe, who teaches composition at the Juilliard School, has clearly steeped himself in the twentieth-century history of the string quartet. There were textural echoes of Bartók (especially in the declamatory writing of the third-movement "Recitative") and Berg. More surprising were the whiffs of English music. One recurrent texture, with the upper instruments in jaunty, irregular rhythmic unison against a lyrical cello line, seemed to come straight out of Benjamin Britten.

In lieu of program notes, Keith Robinson offered brief remarks about each piece. Introducing Peteris Vasks' Third Quartet (1995), he explained candidly that the Miami Quartet had been asked by their record label to learn the Vasks quartets. He added that "this is the best one; everything is in it."

Well, yes. There was certainly something for everyone here. The prevailing tone of the quartet is one of embittered lyricism--one thought first of turn-of-the-century Eastern Europeans like Janácek and Josef Suk. Later, as the tone grew more overtly liturgical, Vasks' fellow-Balt, Arvo Pärt, came to mind but within that mood there was a bewildering array of styles and allusions. More Bartók, of course, again somewhat milder than the genuine article. Plenty of Shostakovich (the slow movement was a virtual paraphrase of the "Largo" of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony). Folk music--a Latvian Christmas carol features prominently in the first movement, according to Robinson in protest (in 1995?) against the Communist suppression of traditional religious festivals.

The finale opens with hymn-like material for string trio against which first one, then the other violin plays trills, arpeggios, and glissandi at the upper limit of its range. Later there is a cataclysm--an explosion of richly cacophonous mayhem that seemed designed to place the piece firmly in its actual decade. For the first and only time, the listeners began stirring in their seats.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1998 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved