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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
January 27, 2004
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By Michelle Dulak
Watching a string quartet change over time is fascinating, especially when a new player joins the group and there is no way to
tell, at first, what's going to happen next. When it's a group of the caliber of the Tokyo Quartet, what stays the same may very
well be nearly as interesting as what changes. The Tokyo's latest lineup played at San Francisco's Herbst Theater last Tuesday, and
judging by that performance the personnel changes of the last several years have made for a more individual, more interesting
quartet.
By the end of Peter Oundjian's long tenure as first violinist, the Tokyo was really too polished for its own good — so
controlled that it was hard to distinguish a live performance from a recording, or for that matter one live performance from the
next. Then Mikhail Kopelman took over the first violin spot, and Clive Greensmith the cello, and the shakeup, although it made for
some of the best chamber playing I've ever heard, was apparently a little much for the players. Kopelman quit the ensemble in 2002,
and since then the first violinist has been Martin Beaver.
Why recount the history? Because second violinist Kikuei Ikeda and violist Kazuhide Isomura (a founding member) have been with the
quartet for thirty years or so, and there's an eerie continuity in the quartet — not only in their playing, but in the
corporate personality — that seems to survive the most evidently violent dislocations. It's difficult to describe; perhaps the
best way to say it is that the interior of the texture is meant to be a single, solid thing, supported by the bass line and
supporting whatever is on top. It is not the business of parts of that texture to call attention to themselves. Until, of course,
they are definitely thrown into the spotlight by the composer; at which point both Ikeda and Isomura reveal that they are very
powerful players.
That was the Oundjian-era Tokyo; and that's today's as well, even though the top and bottom have changed very much. Beaver hasn't the suavity of Oundjian, or the startlingly original sound and technique of Kopelman, but he seems to me a more natural musician than either, and he partners his colleagues very well. As for Greensmith, he continues to amaze me; that rich, effortless, vibrant, subtly modulated sound is a marvel. The Tokyo blend is alive and well; but these days there is a very vivid personality at the bottom of it. Mozart's "Hunt" Quartet, which opened Tuesday's concert, perhaps showcased the impeccable blend and the rich tone more than the quartet's other assets. It could have done with more fun in the first movement, and a lighter touch in the Minuet — those sforzandi on third beats aren't there so much to add accents as to displace them, but the Tokyo hit the third beats and then the following downbeats as well, which made the whole thing more bluff-'n'-hearty than it ought to have been. But the slow movement was genuinely beautiful — it would be a rare cellist who could match Greensmith's slender, pure thread of sound in the second theme — and the finale had all the casual playfulness I'd missed earlier. Beethoven's E-minor Quartet (Op. 59/2), was another matter — a performance pretty well without flaw, not even the flaw of flawlessness. There was no lack of heat, even of recklessness; and yet everything landed right. About the hardest thing a musician can do is convincingly mimic risk. Either the current Tokyo are better mimics than were the foursome of twenty years ago, or they really are taking risks — yes, even to the point of occasional slight flaws of intonation and ensemble. Not everything moves on oiled wheels any more. And yet the perfect poise and the perfect blend are there to be called upon too. The extraordinary hymn of a slow movement was awesome (no, not in the way that provokes loud yells at the end of the performance; in the way that provokes tears midway through). And for the first time in my experience I was glad of the expanded repeat structure in the scherzo, where the trio comes back twice; I wanted that exquisitely blended, delicately molded transition out of the trio to happen again.
The third piece on the program, Joan Panetti's new Piano Quintet, was commissioned by a consortium of music presenters (including San Francisco Performances) called Music Accord, who pool their resources to undertake commissions and then receive the right to present the finished piece. It's a terrific idea, and so I wish I had liked Panetti's Quintet better. It is subtitled "In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See," after a poem by Theodore Roethke, and Panetti (who was also the pianist in the performance) read the poem aloud before the performance. Or, rather, she read the poem stanza by stanza, interspersing the poet's own glosses of each stanza, and her own musical interpretations of the glosses. It was dispiriting to find the glosses a lot less interesting than the poetry, and not altogether surprising when the music turned out to be more gloss than poetry. There were some arresting textures, to be sure — the "tintinnabulation" of the beginning and end, the bittersweet chorale of the third movement, the repeated-note piano recitative of the second (surely Panetti was thinking of Beethoven's Op. 110 Sonata here). But the overall impression was of too many awkward lines, paradoxically comprising too many players. Panetti seems fond of string unison lines, even to the point of putting the quartet's violins in unison for considerable stretches. It was a strange, contrary use of such a sonorous ensemble.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for
Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)
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Tokyo Quartet