Walking a Tightrope

Grateful though we must be for the continual flow of new, exciting young ensembles to Bay Area concert halls, it's another and possibly greater pleasure when the most impressive of them drop in a second time. The Belcea Quartet, whose first visit here was two years ago, made a most welcome repeat appearance Thursday night. The 2006 recital revealed a strikingly polished young quartet with its own firm (and most unusual) profile. The ensemble's San Francisco Performances-sponsored return to Herbst Theatre confirmed and sharpened my first impressions. This is a quartet whose disarmingly easy manner masks an out-of-the-ordinary interpretive strength of purpose.

To be sure, sometimes the disguise is almost too good. In the opening Haydn quartet, the G-Major Op. 77/1, the Belceas narrowly skirted glibness. The playing was lithe, alert, whippet-quick. The tempos of the three fast movements were brisk, the first movement's march verging on a trot and the Scherzo's trio sounding almost like a study for the Scherzo of the Schubert quartet to come. The ensemble's always-airy sound was further simplified by a balance emphasizing first violin and cello, somewhat to the detriment of the inner voices. What prevented the performance from sounding merely slick was the wealth of detail the quartet brought to articulation and, especially, inflection. Leader Corina Belcea-Fisher let no wriggle of Haydn's wide-ranging first violin line pass unremarked — no mean feat at some of her chosen speeds — and her entire performance quivered with personality. The rest of the ensemble, somewhat less demonstratively, did likewise. It was clear from Antoine Lederlin's first, gruffly rolled chord that his buoyant cello line would be the ruling rhythmic impetus. And the inner strings, underbalanced though they seemed to me, dug into the vital stuff of their parts with gusto. Violist Krzysztof Chorzelski's triumphant rising scale at the end of the first movement — a marvelous spot, one that most players skate over — was a highlight for me. The slow movement, one of Haydn's broad, harmonically rich hymns, got a performance of real gravity and intensity. The quartet gave the music's remote modulations the room they needed, not only allowing time for the harmony to register but also playing with a range of colors and dynamics that brought home the scale of the movement's wanderings. It was worlds away from the giddily quicksilver thing the Belceas made of the quartet's finale, but just as apt. Both, in the sharp specificity of their sound-worlds and the intentness with which the music was addressed, made me think of how quartets generally approach late Beethoven, and I found myself wondering what the Belceas' late Beethoven might be like. On this American tour, some of the quartet's programs in fact feature Beethoven's Op. 127; I felt that I could almost extrapolate their performance of that work from this Haydn.

Tailormade for Webern

It was fairly easy, for that matter, to imagine what the ensemble would make of Anton von Webern's Op. 5 Five Movements, but in that case the reality was there to compare with the imagination. The Belceas, with their slender, clear sounds and their minutely attentive inflection of just about everything, are exquisitely adapted to Webern. Their rendition of Op. 5 was transparent, sharply articulated, often hushed to the point of inaudibility — and insanely concentrated of expression. The clarity was remarkable (particularly the cleanness of all the rapid pizzicato), but the intensity sustained through the music's empty spaces was more so. The performance survived even the several seconds of cell phone ring tone (Pachelbel's Canon, of all things) that cut into one of its sparest passages. Schubert's massive, fearsomely difficult late G-Major Quartet (D. 887), which followed after intermission, found the Belceas exercising all their various virtues at once, including a few that the first half of the recital hadn't led me to expect. The quartet's very opening, for example, demands that three players crescendo through a long-held triad in perfect concert; later on you get the same material, but with only two players, so that one of them has to take two of the three notes. All this is devilishly hard to balance and to sustain (and, for that matter, to tune). I'm not sure what I expected from a quartet so reliant on quick, long, light bows, and with (in the Haydn, at least) such unequal internal balances as this one, but it certainly wasn't the steely, eerily unanimous, frighteningly controlled gesture I heard. That almost grim perfection and concentration of control was a recurring element in the Belceas' Schubert. You heard it in the terrifying first violin/viola two-note shrieks in the slow movement, obstinately holding their place while the music, tremolando, modulates against them. You heard it in the clockwork motion of the Scherzo; you heard it also in the quirkier gait of the tarantella finale. But everywhere it came juxtaposed with the Belceas' gentler, lighter palette of colors. In the first movement, the second theme lilted delightfully amid Belcea-Fisher's triplet filigree. The same movement's recapitulation was breathtaking, hushed and ineffably tender, and something of the same dreamlike quality suffused the Scherzo's trio. In the finale, Belcea-Fisher was amazingly nimble, darting through the dizzyingly high violin passagework like a swallow. The strange thing is that it was possible to feel the enormous, even frantic contrasts in the playing while still marveling at the integrity of the interpretation as a whole. Try to do justice to the variety of its material, and this piece has a tendency to spin itself apart. (I've heard performances in which the first movement lurched continually between two unrelated tempos, for example.) Attempt to keep a firm handle on its central direction, on the other hand, and you're almost bound to slight some aspect of it. The Belceas walked that tightrope as well as I've ever seen it done.