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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
They're Young, But They're Good
August 21, 2001
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By Michelle Dulak
On Tuesday, August 21, a couple hundred people quietly assembled at the Crowden School in Berkeley to hear a free concert by a teenage string quartet. I got the impression, from audience conversation, that most of the listeners were there to root for the home team (cellist Evie Koh is a Berkeley native). But the Phaedrus Quartet deserved wider attention than this. This was a group of kids (none older than 20) playing at a level that would not disgrace quartets with members twice as old.
The Phaedrus Quartet is led by the extraordinary young violinist Ilya Gringolts, who is still only 18 but already has several recordings to his credit, on the BIS label, of everything from Paganini to Hindemith to his own (quite impressive) solo sonata. He and his colleagues are all entering their junior year at the Juilliard School, where they formed the Phaedrus Quartet two years back. (Gringolts chose the name from Plato by way of a favorite movement of Bernstein's violin serenade.)
This was my first opportunity to hear Gringolts play live, and he certainly is a marvel. His basic sound is intense, with a narrow and rather fast vibrato and a great variety of color. (Having the use of a Strad can't hurt, of course.) And he has one of those almost ludicrously versatile Russian bow arms, the kind that can do anything, anywhere in the bow.
Sometimes, indeed, it was hard to tell if he was aiming for a particular color or merely showing off. The first violin part of Mozart's D Minor Quartet (K. 421), which opened the program, begins with two long Ds, one high and one low, under a slur. Most violinists take a whole bow on this. Some even split the slur and change bow at the change of note. Gringolts planted his bow on the string at the exact midpoint and then played the entire first bar up-bow so that the delicate articulations of the next bar were done at the very frog, but as deftly as most players (even very good ones) could manage in the comfortable upper half. I don't know whether it was for effect, for practice, or just for the hell of it, but it sure got my attention. Second violinist Yuna Lee's tone is much plainer and struck me sometimes as a little wan, though she could dig in with striking ferocity when she wanted to. Kyle Armbrust's attractive viola timbre was about as different from Gringolts' tone production as it could be — airy, resonant, with a slowish vibrato and a lot of bow speed — and different again from Koh's strong, deep-into-the-string cello. Yet they sounded uncannily unified in ensemble — a little too much so for my taste. This is an unusually top-driven quartet. I don't mean that Gringolts overbalanced the others (he didn't) or even that the balance overall was top-heavy (Koh's assertive cello took care of that). But I repeatedly had the sense that the musical impulse was coming through the leader to the others. It is the kind of quartet playing that aims above all for unanimity, for the illusion of one mind behind the four players — an approach that can work very well, for some music.
It doesn't work very well in Mozart, and the Phaedrus' Mozart was not quite "done" yet. I kept longing for the inner players, especially, to initiate something, to draw attention to their individual lines. But apart from obvious solos, like the viola's in the variation finale, it never happened. No one seemed willing to stick out. And yet at least half the fun of Mozart is in the middle of the texture, and half the joy of playing those inner parts is finding it and making people hear it. Also, the quartet seemed curiously insensitive to the pathos in Mozart's harmony, sailing past (say) a deceptive cadence as though it were just another chord. The low point of the concert was the fast, flippant, and chilly rendition of the slow movement. From there, fortunately, it was all up. Young quartets building a basic repertory love Shostakovich, but they tend to stick to the ubiquitous No. 8 or the almost-ubiquitous No. 7, with a few plumping for 4 (or, for the very pretentious, 15). The Phaedrus went for No. 5, an interesting and daring choice. It's one of the finest Shostakovich quartets but also among the longest and certainly among the most difficult. The Phaedrus performance was fiery, committed, and secure. The playing in the treacherous slow movement was simply amazing. The movement is full of eerie octave-doubled lines, which the quartet played absolutely without vibrato, perfectly in tune, and with a sort of deadly quiet, so that the other player (one independent part is always marked "espressivo") was like a live person wandering among a cloud of ghosts.
As for the Ravel Quartet that ended the concert: the Phaedrus had just been at the La Jolla Summerfest working on the piece under extensive coaching by several well-known string players. I knew this and expected a good performance. But I didn't quite anticipate this lithe, endlessly flexible, subtly colored, delicate but also fierce Ravel. Gringolts did some more amazing things, of course, putting things high up the A string that everyone else leaves on the E. (Would that everyone could hit a high C-sharp or D on the A string with such casual ease!) But this performance was a collective achievement and one that any American quartet ought to be proud to match. So here's a quartet that's already up with the very best but whose leader is even now a recognized star. How long the group will last is anyone's guess, but I for one hope that they will continue. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.) ©2001 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |
