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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Turtle Island String Quartet June 4, 2006
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Lowering the Bar By Heuwell Tircuit
Founded on June 1, 1956, the Morrison Artists Series at San Francisco State University celebrated its 50th anniversary Sunday with a mixed chamber program played by the combined Alexander and Turtle Island string quartets. Naturally, there were speeches and announcements, plus a proclamation from Mayor Gavin Newsom naming June 4 Morrison Chamber Concerts Day. That all seemed appropriate for one of the city's bastions of culture. What did not seem suitable was the lowbrow programming and the indifferent performances given that afternoon.
The Alexander Quartet opened the program with the omnipresent Ravel Quartet in F Major, which was followed by two unidiomatic crossover jazz works by the Turtle Island Quartet. After intermission, the two quartets combined for TISQ violinist David Balakrishnan's three-movement string octet transcription of Darius Milhaud's ballet score, La Création du Monde, before they all launched into Evan Price's study in cultural clash, Variations on an Unoriginal Theme. The large audience enjoyed and cheered all of this, much to my personal surprise.
I cannot understand why the powers that be wanted to lower the traditionally high standards of programming and technical excellence at the Morrison concerts. This series has presented a Who's Who of international chamber ensembles and soloists in sterling models of good, often gutsy programming. Just this past March, the series presented the Juilliard String Quartet playing a serious program (Schubert, Brahms, Viñao), and last February marked a rare public encounter with Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. Yet Sunday's program consisted largely of two warhorses plus a few immature attempts at pops humor, and only rarely well played at that.
For one thing, why represent Milhaud with a transcription, when he left us such a large body of real chamber music, including a snazzy octet for strings — a great showpiece in itself? You need two full quartets to play it: First one group plays his Quartet No. 14, then the second plays No. 15. After the stage has been reset, both quartets repeat their performances, only simultaneously, so as to form the octet. I've heard it performed in full this way only on a very old LP recording by the Budapest Quartet, who recorded the two quartets and, with the aid of over-dubbing, the octet. A performance of this piece would have been more appropriate to the traditions of the Morrison concerts.
Ravel's quartet sounded more like a casual read-through than an actual performance, and that in a style better suited to Rachmaninoff than Ravel: a 220-volt glare set at volume levels that never dipped below mezzo-forte. With Ravel, one has a right to expect elegance, plus a generous helping of his art deco charm. The first violin's cavalier intonation in even moderately high registers set my dentures to twitching, while the whole performance struck me as demonstrating a let-them-eat-cake attitude toward the Ravel.
Cellist Mark Summer of the Turtles played the highlight of the afternoon during his solo in the pops piece On Green Velvet, which was announced from the stage. Summer's quasi-cadenza, largely played pizzicato, leaned on the traditions of virtuoso Spanish guitar style. He pulled that off brilliantly and with real class, thanks in no small part to his excellent intonation and virtuoso security, rare commodities among his Sunday colleagues. Each of the quartets suffered from the first violinists' intonation problems, and the Turtles also dealt with periods of ensemble sloppiness. The Turtle Island Quartet set its sights on, to use the current jargon, crossover music. During Price's Variations, one quartet played a mock-up of a classical style — Mendelssohn to Stravinsky — with each of those variations answered by a foray into pops music from the other quartet — a "battle of the bands," as Price described it. So one got a bit of Irish jig, a bluegrass episode, jazz, some rock, and so on. None of this struck me as well-conceived or stylishly played. The jazz segment, for instance, didn't demonstrate a clue to jazz accenting. It all proved that not every musical style blends with every other kind, or you can end up with something like chocolate-chip pickles served over cigar ice cream. Before the concert, Saul Gropman, the Morrison's director, stated that he is determined to broaden the audience base for this series. They've always been well-attended, and you can't hope to improve attendance by driving off your traditional base. There are venues enough around the Bay Area for pops concerts as it is, without having to alter the noble traditions of the Morrison series with what amounted to sonic confetti. I'd put it to the organizers that "intellectual" is not a pejorative word, and if universities fail to uphold that truth, who will?
(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer who was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote previously for Chicago's American and the Asahi Evening News.)
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