San Francisco Classical Voice

Mark Volkert

That musicians sort out "naturally" into soloists, chamber players, and orchestral players, all ultimately doing the work best suited to them, is a received wisdom just sufficiently true to pass for fact. Players often do incline by temperament or training towards one role or another, though the best can make themselves at home in all three. The real trouble is that modern concert life makes it very difficult for anyone to wear more than one hat. A member of a major orchestra today, for example, has a schedule that--barring a few gaps in the summer--leaves precious little room for anything else.

All the more reason then to praise the San Francisco Symphony's chamber music series, both for showing the public what the players can do and, more importantly, for giving them the opportunity to do it. Sunday afternoon's recital at Davies Symphony Hall brought nine of the Symphony's strings, and the eminent pianist Roy Bogas, together in a wide-ranging program. While the results didn't always match the work of the world's top professional chamber ensembles, sometimes they came very close indeed.

The Symphony's Mark Volkert, who has been acting concertmaster in alternation with Nadya Tichman, has long led a second musical life as a composer. (He has written for many Bay Area ensembles, including an orchestral commission from the Symphony, Solus, premiered in 1996). Volkert took on the further task of leading the performance of his own Quartet No. 4, as first violinist, with obvious glee. He and his co-performers (Mariko Smiley, violin; Nancy Ellis, viola; and Peter Shelton, cello) did the piece proud. This was quartet-playing on a rare level, with an uncanny attentiveness of response between players, and a reservoir of power in the inner strings that all too many professional quartets don't have. (Smiley, in particular, was the sort of second violinist that only a very secure first violinist could tolerate. She nonchalantly surmounted every challenge thrown at her which was quite a feat in Volkert's quartet.)

There are four movements and, very broadly speaking, two competing tones, one "scherzando" (although a few of the jokes are pretty black humor) and one lyrical. The first movement is not so much a contest between the two as a peaceful partition of territory. The scherzo-like material begins the movement, then suddenly breaks off for the entrance of a new theme, all swaying triplets and bittersweet harmonies. Then the opening material takes over again, and remains in control more or less through to the end (excepting a second visit from Theme 2--this is, after all, a sonata form).

The second movement (Slow) is a nearly unbroken cello soliloquy (played with extraordinary intensity and beauty of tone by Peter Shelton), interwoven with reminiscences of the lyrical theme from the first movement. There, the theme's rich-but-dissonant harmonization had put me in mind of Britten's early quartets. Here some of the dissonances had evaporated, and we were breathing the air of the Ravel Quartet's slow movement.

The following "Waltz" is more like the mischievous ghost of a waltz, airily embellished with trills and pizzicati, with sly slides and virtuoso filigree from the composer's first violin, and momentarily brought down--not to earth, but maybe to cloud level--by a trio section in a more subdued Ländler style featuring the viola. The finale (Very fast) is a fugue, with a subject beginning in repeated notes but quickly spinning into what anyone who has been a violin student will immediately recognize as a lick from Fritz Kreisler's Praeludium and Allegro. The fugal subject mutates over the course of the music into a simpler pizzicato version and back, while the lyrical second theme from the first movement returns again--this time as pure melody, without the rich harmonic backdrop that had once seemed its point.

There were places in the piece where I found myself questioning the composer's judgment (isn't the first movement too disjunct? is the second maybe too long?). But in the end, Volkert's kaleidoscopic tour of 20th-c. quartet textures was just too assured and too fun to carp at. Almost everything was in there--Bartok, Hindemith, Britten, Prokofiev, Shostakovich--but with a touch of light humor that was just outside the vocabulary of most of his models.

Half of Volkert's team (Smiley and Ellis) returned immediately afterward for Bartok's Fifth Quartet, with Jeremy Constant as first violinist and Jill Rachuy Brindel as cellist. This is ferociously difficult music. The individual parts are hard enough; putting them together involves insanely intense rhythmic concentration, and only when the rhythm becomes second nature to them can the players really talk to one another in gesture as dedicated quartet players do.

The SFS players might not have reached that point of ease, but they came close. The first movement was a little scrappy (it was certainly the first time I have heard Jeremy Constant sound even slightly technically stretched), but in the succeeding ones the quartet settled down into what I can only call a groove. The two slow movements were played with grace and exceptional control (both involve rapt series of pure triads, which were perfectly in tune), and the scherzo (in a tricky Bulgarian meter) was enviably tight. The finale, almost a replay of the opening movement, found the quartet in confident form, and Constant playing with a full-throated sound that he had withheld in the first movement.

Originally scheduled for the second half was Dvorak's wind serenade, but somewhere along the line someone must have taken pity on the Symphony winds (now up to their eyeballs in Stravinsky) and substituted another work of Dvorak, the E-flat Piano Quartet. The piece is marvelous, and too seldom played, but this performance was a disappointment.

Roy Bogas, the pianist, was joined by three SFS players: Sarn Oliver, violin; Seth Mausner, viola; and Carolyn McIntosh, cello. The strings' sounds, though slender, were ideally matched to one another in tone and vibrato; when Dvorak asked them to play softly together, the blend and intonational purity were wonderful. Acting individually, they were less impressive. For the first time in the afternoon I began thinking about the stereotypical "orchestral musician," fearful of being noticed, determined to fit in.

This was that sort of a performance--neither dull nor unmusical, but plainly anxious lest anything stick out. The joy of real chamber-music playing is that of outsized personalities willingly interacting with one another; here both the personalities and the interaction were all too inconspicuous. Only the colorful and occasionally whimsical playing of Bogas (whom no one could possibly call a retiring musical personality) buoyed the music up.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved