The next time I hear someone bewailing the moribund state of classical music, I'll point them to the Herbst Theatre, where last Saturday morning (a dreary day) a couple hundred music lovers paid to hear a couple of string quartets and an hour of explanation about them.
It helps that San Francisco Performances' new Inspirations series features the excellent Alexander String Quartet, whose performance of each complete work is preceded by a half-hour lecture demonstration by the veteran elucidator Robert Greenberg. After focusing on a single composer for the past few years, SFP's casual-dress (both musicians and audience) Saturday series now pairs a recent quartet with another that may have inspired it.
There's no evidence that Maurice Ravel's iridescent 1903 quartet actually did inspire Lou Harrison's 1979 String Quartet Set, but both composers shared an inspiration: Asian music. As Greenberg noted, the appearance of a Javanese gamelan at Paris' 1889 Universal Exposition amazed Claude Debussy and Ravel. Harrison, enthralled by gamelan recordings in his early 20s, later founded the American gamelan movement, composed some of the century's finest music for Indonesian and American gamelan, and, through diligent study of Chinese, Korean, and other non-Western sounds, created the sturdiest synthesis of classical Asian and Western music.
Though Ravel's general Asian influences are undeniable, Greenberg asked the players to demonstrate purported gamelan textures in the Ravel quartet's predominantly pizzicato second movement. However, he never actually explained how these incomparably beautiful Indonesian percussion orchestras work. If you'd never heard one (perhaps unlikely in the Bay Area, which boasts several), the connection would remain unclear at best. A recording of a real gamelan might have helped, but scholars differ on this point, and I've played gamelan music for years and remain unconvinced.
Still, it's hard to fault the ever-entertaining Greenberg, himself a composer and music historian familiar to local audiences from his decade leading the San Francisco Symphony's Discovery Series. He had to cover a lot of ground — the differences between French and German classical music (longer melodies, slower harmonic development, the musical implications of the French language); between Asian and Western music (cyclical and static vs. narrational and developmental); and a brief biography of Ravel — all of it sprinkled with doses of humor ("without the French and Italians, we'd all be running around in pelts and eating English food").
Just after Greenberg had noted the leisurely aesthetic of Ravel's muse, the Alexanders promptly contradicted him by charging into his quartet's opening movement at a breathless pace — the better, it turned out, to demonstrate the extreme contrasts of tempo and dynamics that characterized their interpretation, as they then slowed down the succeeding segment dramatically. Perhaps it wasn't the most elegant, "Frenchalicious" (to use a Greenberg term) take, but the Alexanders' bracing performance certainly captured much of the beauty, if perhaps not every sparkle of enchantment, in this most magical of chamber masterpieces. This was pretty impressive for a prelunch performance, or even an after-dinner one.
Brett Campbell is senior editor at Oregon ArtsWatch, a frequent contributor to SFCV and many other publications, and coauthor, with Bill Alves, of Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick (Indiana University Press 2017).