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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
June 10, 2004
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By Michelle Dulak
Haydn quartet lovers are used to taking what they can get when it comes to live performances, which is generally not much — a quartet here, a quartet there, generally drawn from the same familiar dozen or so. More often than not even those are played with a perfunctory attention hinting that the lion's share of the rehearsal time went to the rest of the program. So four Haydn quartets in an evening is a tempting prospect. Four Haydn quartets all from the inexplicably-underplayed Op. 50 is an irresistible prospect. Four Op. 50s played with the kind of gusto that the period-instrument Novello Quartet brought to them last Thursday night at Berkeley's Trinity Chapel is, well, about as much fun as it's possible to have sitting in a pew for two hours.
The six quartets of Op. 50 were written in 1787 and dedicated (like so much other great chamber music of the time) to the cello-playing Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia. I can't remember when I last heard a live performance of any of them; certainly there hasn't been one in the Bay Area for many years. Which is odd, given that two of them even have nicknames — No. 5 ("The Dream") and No. 6 ("The Frog"), after the one's luminous, mysteriously-shifting slow movement and the other's humorously "croaking" finale respectively. Ordinarily a nickname is a Haydn quartet's surest ticket to stardom — "The Joke," "The Bird," "The Lark," "The Rider," "The Fifths," "The Emperor," and "The Sunrise" don't really have anything on their opus-mates but a catchy moniker. And yet there's something curiously elusive about this set. The humor is subtler than in Op. 33, the preceding set; the themes are less immediately catchy; the cello parts (despite the dedication to a cellist) aren't gorgeously lyrical in the manner of Op. 20, the one before that. They aren't especially flashy, though they are darned difficult ("The Frog" especially — possibly why it doesn't get played much).
What these pieces need, and so infrequently get, is musicians who "get Haydn" — who understand all the humor, not just the knee-slapping kind of "The Joke"; who delight in inflecting the music on the smallest scale, but aren't obsessed with blend and aren't shy about trying something another way "in the moment"; who are capable of being startled and moved and delighted by things in the music that most quartets, I'm afraid, would glide over without even perceiving. Thursday night such players were on hand.
 The Novello players (violinists Tekla Cunningham and Cynthia Freivogel, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist Elisabeth Reed) will be familiar to followers of the Bay Area early music scene. The quartet itself may not be. It was founded just two years ago to perform Haydn's Seven Last Words, and has kept a relatively low profile so far. I hope that will change, because we could certainly do with more of the audacity and merriment on display at this concert. Not very often have I seen a string quartet having such obvious fun. Cunningham's smile broke into an outright grin whenever she did something particularly outrageous (which was often). As for the fun, well, examples will hardly do it justice, but I'll try. Op. 50, No. 5 begins with the two violins alone, playing a theme with some conspicuous rests in it. After a couple bars, the violins play two repeated notes, the viola and cello respond with two of their own, the violins repeat theirs, the lower strings respond in kind, but on a slightly higher pitch, and then we're off. The two-repeated-note motive is all over the piece, always the two violins against the lower strings. The Novello players did all sorts of things with it. At the beginning it was crisp and light. A little later the lower strings drew it out more, egging the violins into doing the same. Every time it appeared it was a sort of provocation to the other side. And at the recapitulation, where the viola and cello fill in the holes in the theme with yet another two iterations of the motive, Martin's and Reed's gleefully raucous honks were magnificent.
It was the same all through — wonderfully detailed interaction among the parts, but without the slightest hint of the obsessive care the word "detail" ordinarily implies when talking about a performance. Things like the weird stop-and-start Trio of No. 2's Minuet seemed almost to be composed in performance, so natural seemed the puzzlement among the players when the music broke off and tried to find its way again. No. 5's Minuet, with its sassy metrical games at the end, was a blast. As for the "Frog's" finale, it was not note-perfect, but it was exhilarating, the odd theme with its alternating stopped and open notes dashing around from part to part and finally dying out, sotto voce, with a little rumble from the cello. Not everything was as good. The slow movements, in particular, were relatively weak. Reed seemed distinctly uncomfortable with a shift (of left hand position) in the theme of No. 3's Andante, which was unfortunate, given that the phrase occurs over and over again in the movement. "The Dream's" nickname-inspiring Poco Adagio, which really ought to glide seamlessly through its disconcerting harmonies, was distractingly lumpy. And in No. 2's Adagio, too, the lyricism seemed strained at times. (Though it was good to have a chance to hear Freivogel's intense tone in a substantial leading role, at the beginning of the movement; Haydn didn't supply her many extended opportunities.) The one standout slow movement was "The Frog's" stark Poco Adagio, the one really solemn place in the program. And here again the quartet got it, and got it right. The sudden descent from F major into D-flat at the double bar was a genuine shock, and the move to E major a few bars after that a greater one. It is too easy to lose the capacity to be startled by these things. The Novello Quartet hasn't.
(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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