San Francisco Classical Voice

The violinists, very different from one another, work perfectly together. Andrey Shishlov, the first, has one of those deep, rich, burnished Russian tones, a little like Mikhail Kopelman (late of the Borodin and then Tokyo Quartets), though without Kopelman's preternatural bow arm. Listen a little to that sound and you find yourself mentally transplanting it to other music, imagining Shishlov in the Romance of the Shostakovich Second Quartet, or for that matter in the Shostakovich First Concerto, or the Tchaikovsky Concerto, or . . . Suddenly I remembered a long-ago review in some magazine of the Shostakovich Quartet's Olympia recording of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, containing the line (I am paraphrasing from memory), "The first violin line in 'This day shall you be with me in Paradise' has been there already." Yes. Like that.

Second violinist Sergey Pishchugin is very unlike Shishlov — much brighter in tone, more active in manner, impetuous and even (occasionally) reckless. This is a combination that I've seen so often in really fine string quartets that the pattern is hard to deny — the polished, magisterial player on first, the brighter and brasher one on second; the sheen and security on top, the manic energy coming from underneath. It's an arrangement that gets proper doses of gloss and of vigor into precisely the right places in most music. It's not the first-violin line that needs constant prodding; it's the inner parts. And if they are imaginatively and strongly played, so too will be the top line. It is a very rare great quartet that isn't driven somehow from the middle of the texture.

The lower strings were hardly less strong. Violist Alexander Galkovsky has a lovely sound, large and airy but not at all diffuse, with a basically fast but imaginatively varied vibrato. Cellist Alexander Korchagin seemed to be having rather a rough afternoon; his sturdy, rich tone in the lower register was a constant asset, but in the upper reaches of his instrument he sounded strained and not altogether secure pitch-wise.

The all-Russian program began with what was billed as "Rachmaninov's Second Unfinished Quartet." It was apparently "unfinished" in more ways than one: Not only are there only two movements, but each of these was itself left incomplete. Two Soviet musicologists created a performing version in the late 40s. They are presumably responsible for the "textbook" sonata-form structure of the first movement, since Rachmaninov's manuscript breaks off in mid-development. The pro-forma recapitulation does seem a little pat after a development full of striking shifts of key, but it is hard to say what else the completers could have done. What they made performable is really a fine piece, with a dark and passionate opening and a second theme with more than a whiff of Borodin at his most charming. The second movement is stranger and more powerful, dominated by an implacable six-note ostinato. Both were like raw meat to the Shostakoviches, whose performance was as impassioned and deep-toned as anyone could want.

Schnittke's Third Quartet followed. It was impressively played, but perhaps a little too deadpan for such a vast, demented, helter-skelter collision of musical ideas and periods and styles as this. Playing such a piece a little tongue-in-cheek at least avoids the dreadful responsibility of taking it seriously. With the Shostakoviches it was hard to tell; their countenances were serious, but so were they too at the end of the Shostakovich Third Quartet's opening movement, where the humor in the music was so obvious that the audience broke out in spontaneous chuckles. Maybe seeing the joke and not showing it was part of the joke.

A lot of Schnittke's Quartet is haunted by highly recognizable ghosts of other pieces, and what isn't is filled with musical mischief of all descriptions. The anonymous program-note writer (citing another program-note writer) mentions quotations including a cadence from a Lassus Stabat Mater, a theme from Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and Shostakovich's own famous signature-in-music, the four-note "DSCH" pattern (D-E flat-C-B). The annotator says that the first two are obvious (yes), but that s/he cannot hear the third. In point of fact, "DSCH" is all over the place, especially at the end of the piece, where it is strummed, trilled, and otherwise pummeled into the listener's skull with, if anything, rather too much force. Of the others, it's the Lassus that makes the greater impression. It's just a standard Renaissance cadential formula that unexpectedly resolves to what we would now call the subdominant rather than the tonic, but there's something mysteriously touching in the move; I can well understand why Schnittke — or anyone — might have been fascinated by it. The Beethoven references, by contrast, are the composerly equivalent of name-dropping, pathetic if you read them as an attempt to prove the piece's "seriousness," and pretty petty even as a joke.

As for the rest: much mayhem and not a little pathos, but hardly a passage that isn't deliberately — I would almost say maliciously — undermined by the one after it. Take any passage in isolation and it's easy to admire Schnittke's sheer imagination; I liked particularly the place in which a by-then-familiar theme was played sul ponticello and jacked up repeatedly from key to key, as though the quartet were a hockey-rink organ gone berserk. But a piece that breaks off from a fair impression of the fifth movement of Berg's Lyric Suite to hit a sonorous minor chord is not being fair to either the tonal or the atonal camps; it's simply playing with real things, not adding to the sum of them.

The Mill Valley audience not only stuck it out gamely through the Schnittke, but mostly returned after intermission to hear a magnificent performance of the Shostakovich Third Quartet. This is the second performance of the piece I've heard in a week (click here for my review of the St. Lawrence Quartet's performance the Sunday before last), and the contrast was interesting. The St. Lawrences were nervy, high-energy, anxiously seeking to inflect, to make meaning. The Shostakoviches may have thought that they were "just playing the music," for all I know; certainly this is music that they grew up knowing, as few in this hemisphere really have. But such a performance! The first movement, as I've said, was a little too straight-faced to be quite real, but the rest was a marvelous amalgam of physical power, rhetorical force, and ensemble control so complete as to be almost unconscious. A rare achievement.