San Francisco Classical Voice

The first thing that struck me was the dominance of the first violinist, Charles-André Linale. Of the four players he is certainly the one with the sumptuous sound. By comparison, second violinist Emilian Piedicuta and violist Emile Cantor sounded pale and grey, and even cellist Laurentiu Sbarcea a little lightweight.

Indeed, Sbarcea was a puzzle. I don't think I've ever heard a less self-aggrandizing performance of the cello part of any of the "Prussian" Quartets. Every cellist in these pieces steps into the limelight, even if it's only theatrically to renounce it. This was more as though Sbarcea didn't know the limelight was there. It was maddening for a time; when a piece has a de facto soloist, you do expect the player to acknowledge the role, whether in embracing or abjuring it.

But it wasn't timidity, or self-abnegation either. A few dozen bars into the Mozart it was obvious that the light-toned Sbarcea was the other personality of the quartet. The cellist leads off with a lyrical phrase ending in a five-note tag, then echoed by the first violin, repeated by the cello, then batted back and forth many times until it's passed to the second and viola. I'm not sure which of those cello responses it was that hooked me, but I remember thinking, "he gets it!" He was having the right kind of fun — tweaking the little figure and daring the first violin to do the same, dropping in dynamic to see if he could get his partner to follow, audaciously skirting limits in such a way that the violinist would have to sail yet nearer the wind to stay in the game. The remarkable thing is that none of this felt stagey or contrived.

And so it went through the Mozart. Linale sang; Sbarcea, alert and active, seemed to shepherd his inner-string colleagues. And those other two increasingly revealed their own qualities as the concert went on. Even by the end of the Mozart one had to respect both of them, especially violist Cantor (the theme of the finale is murderously difficult to play as cleanly as he did). But Bartók's Second Quartet seemed to show them in a different and more flattering light. Any balance "issues" in the Mozart vanished here. This was a performance almost alarmingly well balanced from beginning to end, every chord voiced perfectly, no voice allowed to overwhelm any other.

And virtuosic as all heck. If you didn't already know from the hastily-prepared program notes that the Orpheus had recorded the complete Bartók quartets, you might have guessed it from this performance. It was the kind of uncanny care that musicians attain when they know that people will have the capacity to hear their work over and over and over again. There was the famous passage at the end of the scherzo, for example — played with what I can only describe as a sort of frantic precision.

As for Beethoven's E-minor Quartet, which ended the concert, here again the lead came from Linale and was seconded by Sbarcea; and yet the wonder of the performance was in the perfect balance among the four players. There were places where Linale seemed to let his lovely tone run away from him, to the detriment of the music (especially in the slow movement). But it was a fine and brave performance, with a swaggering finale that I won't soon forget. (Not just for the swagger, either — the sly legato second theme was nearly the best thing in the performance.)

The Orpheus chose the most bizarre encore that I've ever encountered: the slow movement of Haydn's Quartet Op. 54/2. It's a marvelous piece, a passacaglia with a sort of Gypsy improvisation on top of it (which Linale did magnificently, by the way), but . . . it runs directly in to the Minuet! It ends on the dominant! It's not meant to stand alone! Why?