San Francisco Classical Voice

A string quartet of long standing is an institution, almost as personal as a marriage and a good deal harder to plug holes in than a university music department. But no string quartet can get through more than a few decades without having to replace at least one member, whether through illness or fatigue or sheer disinterest. The Tokyo Quartet, formed in 1969, has acquired new outer players in the last five years. Judging by last week's concerts at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium, a quartet already extraordinarily fine may be on its way to becoming something more.

In 1996, Ukrainian-born violinist Mikhail Kopelman, for 20 years the leader of the Borodin Quartet, replaced the Tokyo's long-time first violinist, Peter Oundjian. Three years later, founding cellist Sadao Harada retired and was succeeded by Clive Greensmith, one-time principal cello of London's Royal Philharmonic (and, for an all-too-brief year, a member of the San Francisco Conservatory faculty).

The old Oundjian-led Tokyo came as close to technical perfection as any quartet ever has. Their playing was impeccably blended and infallibly in tune, every chord weighted with uncanny precision, every dynamic shading managed with a frightening security of control. Indeed, it was the depth of control that was somehow disquieting. Not that they were bland (they were not) or even that they sounded regimented (they didn't). Their playing was full of subtle touches of shading and rubato that had every appearance of being spontaneous. But it was always a shock to compare their live performances to their recordings and find there the same details, down to a hair. It was fearsomely impressive, but it made me uneasy.

So I was intensely curious to see what the radical personnel changes of the last five years had made of the Tokyo Quartet. And what a delight it was to hear the "new" Tokyo at work — taking risks, braving the odd ugly sound or missed shift, trying out interpretive conceptions that hadn't quite jelled yet. Heck, there was even (heaven be praised!) some actual sloppiness. The "old" Tokyo was more secure than this (though, to be honest, not by all that much) but not half so interesting.

Friday night's program was symptomatic of the change. The "old" Tokyo, despite a few forays into more recent music, was fundamentally devoted to the quartet literature's "standards," mostly Beethoven-to-Bartók (though the quartet made some distinguished Haydn recordings early on), and its concert programs reflected that orientation. It is difficult to imagine its offering a "conceptual" program like Friday's "An Evening of Satz and Fugue."

The first half of the recital was devoted to short, individual movements (German: Sätze) for string quartet from the 19th and 20th centuries: Mendelssohn's Four Pieces, Op. 81, Schubert's Quartettsatz, Webern's early (1905) and sugary Langsamer Satz, and György Kurtág's 1977 Hommage à András Mihály (subtitled "12 Microludes," Op. 13). The Mendelssohn pieces were collected together after the composer's death, and except for the last-written two (possibly meant as inner movements of an unfinished quartet) don't have much to do with one another. The Tokyo Quartet used them to set off the other pieces, in effect making a multilayered sandwich, with Mendelssohn as the bread.

The result was a patchwork of hits and misses. The Mendelssohn itself was surprisingly variable. The two later pieces — the "Andante con variazioni," Op. 81/1, and the "Scherzo," Op. 81/2 — came off least well. The "Andante" got a tone color altogether too rich for it, and the tempi were too slow, even without the Tokyo's strange insistence on slowing up at the end of each short phrase of the theme. In the "Scherzo," Kopelman's almost-on-the-string articulation was at variance with his colleagues', and where he needed to trade off in precise alternation with another player, he tended to rush, leaving a small gap.

The slightly earlier E minor "Capriccio," Op. 81/3, went better, though a performance with a little less vehemence might have done a better job of disguising the fugue's obsession with the tonic key. Best, strangely, was the very early (1823) Fugue in E-flat, Op. 81/4, which the program notes skewered as "pedantic" and "a showy student exercise," but which had, in so concentrated a performance as this one, a kind of hypnotic fascination.

As for the rest: The "Quartettsatz" was brilliant and colorful, though with the same nagging tendency to slow down (but never speed up) for rhetorical effect. (The repeat, unfortunately, was skipped.) The Webern was drop-dead gorgeous — lingering pointedly (and poignantly) in all the right places, and played with a rare richness and variety of tone. In the Kurtág — a set of 12 tiny, fascinating timbral studies, most of them under a minute long — the Tokyo players occasionally seemed ill at ease, but the composer's sharply etched miniatures nonetheless sprang wholeheartedly into life.

The short but intense second half was devoted to "Fugue." Mozart's Adagio & Fugue, K. 546, derives from a two-piano fugue the composer wrote in the early 1780s, which he later arranged for string quartet or orchestra (adding a harmonically wide-ranging Adagio as prelude). It's virtuoso counterpoint but unrelentingly dour music, and one of the very few Mozart works that is near impossible to bring off in performance. The Tokyo came as close to making it work as I've ever heard. The textures were clear, the harmonic direction ditto; following the theme around (right-side-up and upside-down, in stretto, &c.) was suddenly not only possible but fun. It became a piece I could actually enjoy.

The quartet stood briefly to acknowledge the applause after the Mozart, then sat down again and proceeded to play the bejeezus out of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. There's no way to describe the performance better than to say that listeners coming from very different directions could have taken joy in it. Stravinsky called the Grosse Fuge "pure interval-music." He would have been taken aback by the abandoned ferocity of the Tokyo, but at least he would have heard the intervals, which were unnervingly accurate.

Those who are most impressed by the violence of the Grosse Fuge (which must include almost everyone who has ever tried to play it!) would have found it here, in spades, though they would doubtless have been awed by the Tokyo's sheer accuracy. The Tokyo encompassed both the austere structure and the outlandish physical strictures. And then, when the fugue suddenly called on them to be relaxed and genteel (after the slow middle section), they met that demand as well with apparent ease. (This was the first chance Kopelman had, in this exceptionally diverse program, to showcase his charm, which is almost as formidable as his legendary bow-arm.)

As for the Tokyo's second recital, on Sunday: Lucky are they who heard it, since it might be a long time before any chamber music performance of this quality happens in the Bay Area again. Beethoven's late E-flat Quartet, Op. 127, was the first half, and the Tokyo's performance was a miracle from first note to last. There was overflowing lyricism pervading the whole first movement and suffusing the heartbreakingly intense exchanges between first violin and cello in the succeeding slow movement. But there was also the most exacting rhythmic precision. Kopelman's technique in the upper half of the bow was always a marvel, but in the Scherzo of Op. 127 it found its own natural home. I don't think anyone alive could toss off Beethoven's dotted rhythms with greater insouciance. And the rest of the quartet took its inspiration from him.

The finale was likewise full of marvels. There's a passage midway through, for example, where the viola takes up the theme in A-flat. I had never heard a performance balanced correctly — until Sunday. There violist Kazuhide Isomura shone, with a gloriously liquid tone, while the others (as they should have) accompanied. And the coda was miraculous — hushed, mystical, altogether marvelous.

And then there was the Brahms Sextet No. 2, for which St. Lawrence Quartet members Lesley Robertson (viola) and Marina Hoover (cello) joined the quartet. A very great performance, this, one in which almost everything went right. The hushed opening made me catch my breath. But that was only the beginning: The stillness of the development's opening, sotto voce, was more remarkable and more hard-won. The second and fourth movements were animated and full of fun.

But what crowned the whole concert was the slow movement: eerie and mysterious at first, quickening gradually into life as it went, and ending ultimately in a rich, bittersweet skein of melody, full of numberless horn calls. I've heard nothing like the peroration of this movement as the Tokyo and colleagues played it — deep, rich, many layered, and intolerably sad. It will be a long time before it vanishes from my memory.

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

©2001 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved