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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
October 9, 2005
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Not since an ensemble containing the likes of Oscar Shumsky and Josef Gingold was named after William Primrose has a string quartet's violist gotten such attention. But Bay Area music-lovers may be pardoned a little extra interest in the Takács Quartet, now that Geraldine Walther is part of it. We've seen great string players leave the Bay Area to join great string quartets before. It was only half a decade or so ago that Clive Greensmith departed the San Francisco Conservatory for the Tokyo Quartet. But Greensmith had only been here a year, whereas Walther would have been called a Bay Area fixture were she not so obviously, almost defiantly, animate. In her decades with the San Francisco Symphony she was a presence in a sense that few players even in the great orchestras can claim to have been. It was natural to find Zellerbach Hall filled for her return to the Bay Area; it was a hearty and well-deserved "welcome home."
Except that, on hearing the Takács in this latest incarnation, it's obvious that Walther is home, with this quartet. The Takács manner of making music is hers. The quartet's going principles appear to be (1) have fun; and (2) nail everything. (In that order, but only just.) That is Walther as San Francisco Symphony audience-members know her: a brilliant technician and a rather alarmingly alert orchestral player, but one whose enjoyment of the job was so evident that it was easy to forget how ruthlessly good she was at it. Now she's with three other players of like mind, and what was already one of the best quartets in the world is getting ratcheted a further step up, from inside.
The program showed confidence. No one with any sense puts three familiar masterpieces on one program without being sure of all of them. Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet, K. 465, opened the concert, and what was interesting about it was, strangely, how little the anticipated Geraldine Effect had to do with the impact of the performance. There were, of course, places where Walther's viola took center stage — some places anyone who knows the work would anticipate, a few that even I (who have played that viola part many times) didn't — but the great things were ensemble effects, beginning with the exquisitely-controlled opening Adagio and going right through to the finale, led by Edward Dusinberre's quicksilver first violin though not monopolized by it. It was elegant Mozart but not effete; powerful, but free of the steroidal "American muscle-quartet" vibe.
 The Debussy Quartet that followed was a striking and individual performance, unusually propulsive and even harsh in some places, remarkably tender in others. Walther's earthy ostinato at the beginning of the scherzo more or less set her seal to the performance, but she was very nearly upstaged by second violinist Károly Schranz, who played the demanding pizzicato line opposite as distinctly, powerfully, and evenly as I've ever heard it done. Dusinberre's handling of the ostinato when he took it over from Walther was typical of the quartet all through this concert. It was in a different vein, light and silvery, without Walther's edge, and yet there was no incongruity. Nor was there when Walther traded lines with cellist András Fejér, even though his is a plainer sound and a tighter vibrato. Elsewhere in the piece there was great finesse and great power. The end of the slow movement deserves both words; it was extraordinarily controlled, and extraordinarily beautiful. The joyous tumult of the outer movements was one of those "art-concealing-art" triumphs. You would not have guessed it possible to make so much mayhem in rhythmic unison without even appearing to plan it. And the pacing of the first movement in particular was miraculous, giving the impression of continuous acceleration all through the development section without actually changing the pace very much at all, just staying on the front edge of the beat. If the Debussy was fine, the Brahms Piano Quintet that followed was almost scary. Garrick Ohlsson, in Zellerbach, playing Brahms, lid full up, sounds to me like a recipe for either "inaudible string quartet" or "string quartet sawing holes in its instruments in the futile hope of being audible, at least a little." It was neither. In fact, it was the best-balanced performance of the piece I've ever witnessed. (The best-coordinated, too: small details that never are together, in the scherzo especially, were this time.) Ohlsson has a reputation as something of a banger, but it would be impossible to guess it from Sunday's playing, which was nimble and un-clattery and chamber-musicianly almost to a fault. The quartet, meanwhile, outdid itself. The stormy bits were impressively ferocious (Schranz and Walther played as though they'd made bets on who could break the most bow-hairs in the scherzo), but it was the shaping of the whole that impressed, and the players' ability to veer from that ferocity to deadly calm or bubbly hilarity at the turn of a page. The Takács Quartet is back next March, continuing the Beethoven series it began in the pre-Geraldine era. The concert is reputedly already sold out, but anyone remotely interested in string quartets should be keeping an eye out for returned tickets. Chamber-music playing doesn't get a lot better than this. (Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.) ©2005 Michelle Dulak Thomson, all rights reserved |
