San Francisco Classical Voice

Felix Mendelssohn's Octet for strings, Op. 20, composed in his sixteenth year, is one of the great miracles of music history -- audacious in its conception, wide-ranging in its expression, approaching perfection in its composition.

The Octet was played last Saturday, May 22, in very nearly ideal circumstances: by eight musicians who respect and learn from one another, to a full and attentive audience, in an acoustical setting favoring both their instruments and Mendelssohn's music. The hall was St. Philip's Church, where the Redwood Arts Council was closing its current season. This is a small redwood-lined hall seating maybe 160 people in the silence of the small western Sonoma County town of Occidental.

The players were the Alexander String Quartet, nine years resident at San Francisco State University, and the Chamberlain String Quartet, one of the groups that residency has coached and encouraged. Mendelssohn's music is nothing if not ardent, and ardor demands personable expression. This too were achieved. The combined quartets were notable for the individuality of their members: they tossed off fast ensemble passagework quite precisely, and revealed careful intonation in the full resonance of many-voiced harmonies; but their solo moments introduced fascinating differences of tone-color and gesture.

The Mendelssohn had been set up, so to speak, by a performance of another octet, composed exactly a century later by Dmitri Shostakovich, then nineteen and finishing his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory. Its two movements contain many of the virtues and flaws of the work to come. The Prelude (Adagio) is the more interesting, alternating solo recitatives with imitative counterpoint, effectively investigating the aural space formed by detaching the three highest violins from the remaining quintet.

The rattletrap Scherzo (Allegro molto) that follows is in the familiar frenzied mood of many of Shostakovich's later works, relentless and strident. The players managed a very fast tempo, necessarily sacrificing tonal beauty to speed and insistence. The contrast with Mendelssohn's scherzo, often related to the music of his famous Midsummer Night's Dream overture, was telling, and had much to say about the contrast of the two composer's worlds.

In his Prelude, Shostakovich seems often to be thinking about the opening of Mozart's C-major Quartet, K. 465, the "Dissonant," and the Alexander obligingly opened the evening with that piece. It was a solid performance, bringing out much of the elegance and balance of the piece, poised so nobly between classical structural restraint and romantic expression.

One can disagree with certain tempo liberties: the Alexander tended toward too-frequent rallentandi to mark architectural divisions perfectly clear without them. (Curiously, one could have asked for a few such moments in the Mendelssohn, whose Andante in particular lacked a graceful rounding at its close.) One might ask for a little less vibrato, too. That apart, it was a fine performance of a piece which, after all, hardly needs persuasive interpretation.

For the record, the Alexander's personnel consists of Ge-Fang Yang and Frederick Lifsitz, Paul Yarbrough, and Sandy Wilson. Zakarias Grafilo heads the Chamberlain, Darcy Rindt and Eugene Sor are violist and cellist. Second violinist Sharon Hendee was replaced, with great assurance and maturity, by Deborah Tien, who had that very morning graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory. It was an evening marked by the intersection of youth and experience, wisdom and enthusiasm.

(Charles Shere is a composer and writer living in Sonoma county.)

©1999 Charles Shere, all rights reserved