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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Tokyo String Quartet
January 5, 2007
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Well-Matched Urbanity By Scott MacClelland
Like a Javanese court gamelan, the instruments of the Tokyo String Quartet stay together even when the personnel change. The matched set of Stradivari violins, viola, and cello, permanently on loan to the TSQ for a decade, has become its signature sound, as warmly burnished as it is timbrally even across the entire compass of voices. That sound freshly seduced Chamber Music Monterey Bay, now presenting the TSQ to Carmel audiences for the eighth time since 1978, and for the first time since the city's wholly renovated and widely adored Sunset Center Theater opened in 2003.
For sheer stamina in the face of an exhausting travel schedule, the ensemble has won its venerability the hard way. And in recent years, it has survived a relative swinging door in its first violin, which, since 2002, has been in the hands of Martin Beaver. A Canadian native with obvious musical and leadership qualities, Beaver was barely out of diapers when violist Kazuhide Isomura joined fellow Japanese students at the Juilliard School to create the instantly acclaimed ensemble in 1969. At second violin, Kikuei Ikeda joined the quartet in 1974.
Tokyo Quartet Photo by Peter Checchia
This time out, and in their sole Bay Area appearance this season, the Tokyo String Quartet framed Jennifer Higdon's new (2005) composition An Exaltation of Larks with favorites by Mozart and Schumann. Higdon has proven herself a master at keeping busy textures clear, and that is certainly the case through most of this ecstatic 15-minute opus (which was commissioned for the TSQ). In it, Clive Greensmith, a member since 1999, gets to show off his cello and soar above the other voices, while textures range from thick Messiaenlike reveilles to nocturnal murmurings. Higdon uses enough repeating patterns to vouchsafe to listeners a memory of the piece, while its flights of fancy — tonal and octatonic — and its variety of moods are held within a reliable formal structure. Among the many delicious turns in Mozart's daring Quartet in E-flat, K. 428, are the passing dissonances in the Andante second movement (which otherwise casts its spell without benefit of any discernable theme). Mozart's six "Haydn" quartets, of which this is nominally the third, should propel any fan back to the Op. 33 set by Haydn himself, since they supplied Mozart with his primary impetus. Here was Mozart honoring the older master, but also competing with him. (By now, everybody knows the story of Haydn's gobsmacked reaction after Mozart showed him the goods.) In this reading, the TSQ massaged the rich sonorities of their Strads in favor of Mozart's cheekiness; even the dissonances — and the rare note off true pitch — sounded delicious.
Schumann's last-of-three quartets makes for a startling reminder that the composer was a genuine visionary. In the Adagio you'll hear a proto-Brahms episode. But, for all that, the work as a whole leaps beyond Brahms, setting an avant-garde example that, so far, has attracted little imitation. The second movement is a gutsy Variations that initially disguises its theme — a trick that Sibelius uses in his Fifth Symphony. A dotted rhythm in the romancing third movement appears in reverse (more or less) in the finale. Beaver has been in place long enough now that any idiosyncrasies he may have brought to the chair are well-blended into the ensemble's style and sound. A case could be made that even with its historic creaminess the old Tokyo retained a certain rural sensibility and that Beaver sounds slightly more urban — or perhaps urbane. At worst, that may be an illusion. At best, it might be the ideal entrée needed to stir the old pot a bit, an inevitability after a new cook starts adding his own spices. Responding to repeated curtain calls, the ensemble mounted a high-spirited charger for the finale of Haydn's quartet Op. 74, No. 3, the movement that gives the work its nickname "The Rider." This concert is scheduled for broadcast by KUSP-FM (88.9) on Jan. 28 at 11 a.m.
(Since 1978, Scott MacClelland 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. In recent years he has contributed articles to Strings magazine.)
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