The primary strength of some string quartets lies in transparency, in making what they play sound as though it could only go this way. Others insist on making you aware that theirs is a point of view, that there is a medium as well as a message. It is an approach to quartet playing that has, of course, the potential to become uniquely irritating: A quartet with no identifiable point of view can't grate on you half so annoyingly as one that has a strong point of view you actively dislike and that won't let you forget it for a microsecond.
But if you can stand having your preconceptions violently rearranged, there’s nothing quite like hearing music you know well tackled by an ensemble bent on comprehensively rethinking everything. That the Princeton University-based Brentano String Quartet is one of that kind, we know from past Bay Area visits. Wednesday's recital at Herbst Theatre (the ensemble's San Francisco Performances debut) found the Brentanos once again bringing their particular brand of introverted intensity to bear on music both old and new.
Among the works the quartet has brought on this current tour (though not to Wednesday's recital) are transcriptions of Monteverdi madrigals by first violinist Mark Steinberg. The very idea suggests the direction in which the players' thought is tending now: toward something like a vocal-consort sound, with every line, all the time, bearing meaning. Certainly something like that sound-ideal hovered behind the performances of the two older works on Wednesday's program.
Mendelssohn's F-Minor Quartet was his last substantial composition, written after the crushing news of his sister Fanny's death, and only months before his own. It is anguished music — grim in the manner of Beethoven's quartet in the same key, but without that work's ruthless concision. Where Beethoven pares down, Mendelssohn breaks out. Some stretches seem like outpourings of raw rage. It's the only mature Mendelssohn composition I know in which something gets the better of his instinctive sense of proportion.
Much of the piece bristles with sharp, spitting bowstrokes, and that's the sound that tends to dominate good performances. (I mean by "good performances" those that take the work's maddened grief seriously — I've heard a few that attempted, grotesquely, to treat the fury almost as a species of Mendelssohnian scherzando.) The danger is that the atmosphere of hysteria that is always at the surface of the work can come to overwhelm everything else in it, so that the piece devolves into an unrelieved half-hour of crazed hectoring.
By no means did the Brentano Quartet slight the work's violent energy, but for most of the performance it emphasized the music's darkness rather than its bitterness. The blistering sixteenth notes of the first movement were under tight control, seething yet not slashing. The hemiola-laced Scherzo was likewise held in a firm grip, the more menacing for its taut purposefulness.
Still, it was clear that for the Brentanos the core of the piece was to be found elsewhere. The Scherzo's gaunt trio, with violist Misha Amory and cellist Nina Maria Lee moving in sepulchral octaves beneath the subdued keening of the violins, was bleak and yet strong as I have never heard it. And the slow movement was a seamless skein of sorrowing melody — rich, dark-toned, sustained with anguished concentration.
The effect was one of an overwhelming emotion controlled — barely — at an immense cost. And when the control finally snapped, toward the end of the finale, you knew it, too; Steinberg's ever-more-frantic first violin line went, irretrievably, from "still on top of it" to "outright unhinged."
Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.