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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
October 30, 2004
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By Scott MacClelland
The highly accomplished St. Petersburg String Quartet's program in Carmel on Saturday opened with discursive works by the Georgian composer Zurab Nadarejshvili and his spiritual mentor, Dmitri Shostakovich. Both were darkly circumspect musings groping for light and life in worlds beset with loss and grief. Thanks to the St. Petersburg (originally named Leningrad Quartet after the city of its birth), the 1985 Nadarejshvili work has attracted widespread attention and a CD on the Delos label. That in turn has led to other compositions for them by the 47-year-old Tbilisi State Conservatory professor.
Nadarejshvili portrays his nation's character by strongly contrasting its medieval liturgical chant with crushing Stalinesque malevolence, in much the same spirit as Shostakovich's own well-known symphonies and string quartets. (Shostakovich's vocabulary is also much imitated.) Stalin is mockingly represented in the middle movement, Allegro vivace, replete with col legno tappings and falling glissandos. The outer movements are both reflective and improvisational — the first rising with impassioned dynamics, the last, marked “ad libitum (quasi adagio),” weaving its voices polyphonically. But compared with Shostakovich, the Nadarejshvili piece feels filtered by an intervening generation, like a story told secondhand.
The Shostakovich Quartet No. 12 of 1968 aches with the composer's creative torments. Its chromatic — even serpentine — opening theme on the cello blurs the nominate key of D flat. Counterpoint is often used for contrasting effect — now wistful, now ironic, now energizing — always implying something deeply personal behind the composer's powerful and non-sentimental intellect. This unique quality can give players trouble in finding the right emotional tone of expression. On this occasion, these players were a bit too subdued, too circumspect. As a result, the opening two works wanted more urgency. That's a judgment call, of course, and won't be to everyone's taste. But we now live in a world in which intensity is one of the parameters that musicians must take into account (thanks to the likes of Leonard Bernstein and, more to the current point, the Emerson String Quartet, well known for its sharply drawn Shostakovich interpretations).
The star of the evening's second half was Teddy Abrams, the precocious teenager from Palo Alto, who apparently doesn't know that mere mortals can't be doing so much, so professionally, at his age, namely: playing piano, composing, conducting and, in this instance, playing clarinet in the Brahms' Quintet in B Minor. Before starting, Abrams provided spoken background to the Brahms, recalling the impact, on the aging (then in his late 50s) composer, of the Meiningen clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, who was the inspiration for a trio, two sonatas and, after Mozart a century earlier, the second greatest clarinet quintet in history. The collaboration between Abrams and the St. Petersburg proved most felicitous, a loving and yearning performance that greened up the autumnal Brahms with the young clarinetist's flawless technique and youthful ardor (especially in the “storm sequence” that punctuates the second movement Adagio). Abrams plays without a trace of vibrato, fearlessly giving himself no place to hide. But no hiding was needed and the hosting Chamber Music Monterey Bay's audience knew it. Abrams has plainly emerged as a master of the instrument. As if to gild the prodigy's lily, the five musicians encored with an Abrams original called Tanzoct, an “octatonic dance” the composer explained. The five-minute ditty cleverly shifted its material (using a “gypsyesque” scale) among the instruments, “in true encore fashion,” Abrams added.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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St. Petersburg Quartet
Teddy Abrams