San Francisco Classical Voice

The Bay Area is not a bad place to live if you love string quartets. Not only do most of the great touring ensembles come through occasionally, but an unusually high number of fine quartets make their home here. To the ranks of the Kronos, Alexander, Ives, and Aurora Quartets was recently added the St. Lawrence Quartet, in residence at Stanford University. The St. Lawrence, whose Thursday night recital at the San Francisco Conservatory was under the auspices of the school's Chamber Music Masters program, was formed ten years ago by four young Canadians. The group is a familiar name to quartet mavens, having racked up a slew of competition wins and landed a recording contract with EMI Records.

On the evidence of Thursday's concert, the St. Lawrence has an interesting corporate personality. Their playing is full-bodied, but limber; they make a big sound, but not an especially weighty one, relying as much on zingy articulation as on sheer strength in climactic moments. The quartet seems heavily top-driven, with violinists who outstrip the lower strings in personality, if not in power. I want to be cautious here, however, because the physical styles of the players tend to reinforce that impression. Both violinists are the sort of players who cannot sit still, especially the leader, Geoff Nuttall, who favors extreme gyrations from the waist (a writer who, reviewing another St. Lawrence concert, referred to "sit-down break-dancing" was exaggerating only a little). By contrast, the violist and cellist are the sort who produce a maximum of sound with an apparent minimum of physical effort.

Janacek's first quartet (the Kreutzer Sonata), which opened the program, suited their particular gifts very well. Nuttall did some amazing things with the first violin part's many soliloquies, playing with something like a great vocalist's control of color and nuance. The second violin's furious outbursts and driving ostinati fell to Barry Shiffman, whose bright sound and slashing bowing made the most of them. Despite wielding what looked like a humongous instrument, violist Lesley Robertson was occasionally overbalanced by Marina Hoover's powerhouse cello playing, but both players' rhythmic alertness and boldness of articulation were impressive.

Following the Janacek with Osvaldo Golijov's 1992 Yiddishbbuk (subtitled "Inscriptions for string quartet") was a bit of unconventional programming that paid off. The peculiar mix of violence, desolation, and ecstasy in Golijov's quartet is not terribly far from Janacek, however dissimilar the musical language. The St. Lawrence was right on top of the music, giving a performance of great intensity without for a moment letting technical control slip. There were places where the quartet's technical security and coloristic imagination combined to breathtaking effect. The opening of the second movement, all in harmonics, was uncannily beautiful.

Schumann's quartets are clearly dear to the St. Lawrence (the group's recently-released debut recording is of two of them), and Thursday's performance of the A-major, Op. 41/3, evidenced a lot of intelligence and care. It was still a very strange experience. Schumann's rather conservative quartets tend to puzzle people who come to them from the composer's much freer and more rhapsodic piano music; the St. Lawrence spent this performance drumming it into the audience's heads that the same man wrote both bodies of work.

Tempo was very flexible, most noticeably in the textbook sonata-form first movement, to the point where a two-bar violin flourish stretched almost to the dimensions of a cadenza. Nuttall also decorated the same movement's omnipresent sighing descending fifth with oddly fussy and un-vocal portamenti. Welcome though it is to see a young quartet enthusiastically bending and sliding like this, I was troubled by the air of contrivance about it.

The other three movements were less mannered and had particular pleasures of their own (the raw energy of the quartet's articulation in the next-to-last variation of the second movement was thrilling, and Robertson revealed a rich and voluptuous viola sound in the third that I hadn't heard in her playing in the Janacek). But there remained something excessively calculated about the playing, all the more disheartening in that the point of the calculation was evidently to give the impression of spontaneity. It was the playing of a group trying hard to distinguish itself.

That impression was only reinforced by the encore, a--to my ears--astonishingly wrongheaded performance of the slow movement of Haydn's D-minor quartet, Op. 76/2, in which the simple gestural language of the tune was turned in unwarranted directions, and the delicate filigree of the first violin part towards the end became a rather macho display of technical prowess. It was sad to hear that from a quartet obviously capable of great things.

(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