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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
January 22, 2006
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
It was a night of exhilarating music-making, drawing on music of two centuries, but the most interesting thing about the Tokyo Quartet's Sunday recital at Herbst Theatre was that the quartet programmed the first of the Bartók Quartets. Now that they've resumed recording (for Harmonia Mundi), who knows what's possible?
The First is the one Bartók quartet you don't often find played outside a cycle. (I certainly haven't heard it played live before except in festival-like events involving all six quartets.) The reasons are pretty obvious, and have nothing much to do with the quality of the music per se. The piece is long, for one thing, and the length isn't divided into short, colorful bits as it is in the Fourth and Fifth. This is of a piece with the next problem, which is that it doesn't sound sufficiently "modern" all the way through to merit the "modern-music" spot on a quartet program. No one who's heard any Bartók will fail to recognize the finale as Bartók, but then it does take almost 20 minutes to get to the finale, and by then a listener expecting a harsh dose of modernity any second might be extremely puzzled. (And even then, all the listener would get is a lot of energy and some "snap" rhythms.)
So it was a definite treat to hear the Tokyo Quartet on Sunday, playing the piece with such obvious dedication, care, and (incidentally) abandon. There have been enough great Bartók quartet cycles in recent years — to say nothing of older ones reissued (see last week's SFCV for one example) — to make you think enough is enough, but after this performance I'm inclined to say that enough is never enough where this music is concerned. We can be Beethovened to death, and are certainly likely, shortly, to be Mozarted to death, but it's not so much that you get overwhelmed by listings of Bartók performances as that you get "overwhelmed" by the ones you do actually hear.
The quartet sounded as it always does, magnificent top to bottom, with that mysterious quality that keeps you looking for the secret in the "top" (first violinist Martin Beaver) and the "bottom" (cellist Clive Greensmith) before realizing that at least half of it is in the playing of the two remaining founding members of the ensemble, second violinist Kikuei Ikeda and violist Kazuhide Isomura. The rest of the concert, devoted to earlier music, was at least as good. Haydn's Op. 74, No. 3 (known as "The Rider") got about as good a performance as I've ever heard. More intra-quartet politics: I wouldn't have expected the rest of the ensemble to follow Beaver here, especially in the finale, where Beaver saw the quasi-Magyar nature of the part and ran with it, almost literally. The rest of the piece was marvelous, almost as a matter of course, especially the slow movement, where Beaver managed much better than most violinists do the illusion that all those wacky embellishments were his own, not Haydn's. As for the Mozart Clarinet Quintet: Sabine Meyer was fantastic, quite the most articulate and adroit clarinetist I've ever heard. I feared she would hit her music stand more than once, because she certainly flings the instrument around, but she managed not to bang anything, and her playing was suave and boisterous and caressing, with a wonderful way of turning a corner suddenly and changing tone. She and Beaver ran each other a merry chase in one of the finale's variations, and it was hard to tell who was the nimbler. But in the end it was all harmony, and a joyous rush to the finish. We're going to hear a lot of Mozart this year. May it all sound like 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.)
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Sabine Meyer
