[3/18/2012] Two chamber concerts, with pleasures stacked in an unexpected direction (continued)

The Fine Arts Quartet today (with each member's year of entry): first violinist Ralph Evans (1982), second violinist Efim Boico (1983), cellist Robert Cohen (2012), and violist Nicolò Eugelmi (2009).

NOTE: Online you can find a smoking-hot young Ralph Evans -- sporting a lush, only slightly receding head of curly dark hair -- delivering a mellifluous performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (a piece we spent some time with last December) in July 1982 at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, with Pavel Kogan conducting -- 1st movement, part 1 and part 3 (I don't see part 2); 2nd movement; 3rd movement. Evans was awarded sixth prize, and the following December succeeded longtime Fine Arts Quartet first violinist Leonard Sorkin, and the rest is history. (There's also a 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition performance of the Bartók Second Concerto and an audio-only 1994 performance of the Mendelssohn E minor Concerto.)

ABOUT THE FOUR VIOLINISTS

The Fine Arts's current bio points out that violinists Ralph Evans and Efim Boico have now been playing together for nearly 30 years, and boy, does it show! This doesn't happen that often in string-quartet life, since many violinists chafe at long terms in the second-violin slot of a string quartet, which is often held to be relatively easily replaceable. But it's amazing the difference it can make when the second violinist not only is an excellent player in his own right but is closely integrated with his/her fellows.

The way the Fine Arts violinists complement each other is special, and violist Nicolò Eugelmi, although a much more recent colleague, seems to take special pleasure in hearing how he can combine optimally with his mates, separately and together. The energetic new cellist, Robert Cohen, is fitting in very nicely and also bringing the ensemble a welcome shot of oomph.

You wouldn't expect this kind of "complementarity" from the ad hoc ensembles of the CMS concert, which a program note explained was inspired by a favorite party pastime of one of the great chamber musicians, Robert Mann (the founding first violinist of the Juilliard Quartet in 1946, who remained in that chair until he retired in 1997). Mann apparently enjoyed throwing members of four different quartets together to play -- without rehearsal -- a work they'd undoubtedly played with their respective quartets but never together. It sounds like a lot of fun, though probably only fully appreciable by musicians who knew firsthand what it was like to play the quartet repertory on a year-in, year-out basis. Here was the musical lineup for Tuesday's CMS concert:

Misha Amory, viola -- Brentano Quartet
Shmuel Ashkenasi, violin -- Vermeer Quartet
David Finckel, cello -- Emerson Quartet
Joel Krosnick, cello -- Juilliard Quartet
Arnold Steinhardt, violin -- Guarneri Quartet
Steven Tenenbom, viola -- Orion Quartet

It was certainly an all-star gathering, then, the kind of occasion that doesn't come along often. And the evening certainly had its rewards, just not as many as I might have expected.

The workhorses were the two violinists, who played in all four works on the program: before intermission, the sextet that Richard Strauss wrote as the prelude to his last opera, Capriccio, and Fritz Kreisler's A minor String Quartet; after intermission, six brief violin duets from the 34 composed by Luciano Berio in the years 1979-83, and one of the sublime Mozart string quintets, the C minor, K. 406, arranged from the Octet for Winds, K. 388.

IT WASN'T JUST LACK OF FAMILIARITY --

The program note assured us that these musicians, unlike Bobby Mann's "party" quartets, had rehearsed, though obviously not extensively. However, I really don't think it was lack of collegial familiarity I was hearing, though I did wonder if perhaps Orion Quartet violist Steven Tenenbom was overwhelmed by the circumstances. In the three works he played (in order,: the Strauss sextet as first violist; the Kreisler Quaret; and the Mozart quintet as second violist), I made an increasing effort just to hear him, and found him barely detectable outside the overall framework.

Still, by and large the qualities I picked up were consistent with what I've heard from the ensembles in which these gentlemen normally play (or played, in the case of the Guarneri Quartet, which officially retired in 2009 last year, with Steinhardt, second violinist John Dalley, and violist Michael Tree having remained in place for the full 45-year run). I can't say I ever found the Guarneri a very interesting quartet. It seemed to take on Steinhardt's personality: musical enough, but decidedly drab, and I've been even less a fan of the celebrated Emerson Quartet.

The Vermeer Quartet's Shmuel Ashkenasi, who once had a fairly active (and fairly interesting) solo career, is to my hearing a noticeably more interesting musician than Steinhardt, which provided a big lift when he switched to the first-violin position in the second-half Berio and Mozart works. Joel Krosnick, who was in his early 30s when he replaced Claus Adam as cellist of the Juilliard Quartet, is now a white-haired septuagenarian but remains a dynamic player, and lent more urgency to the Mozart than Finckel did to the Kreisler. It's also hard to believe that the Brentano Quartet is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. I haven't heard much of them in recent years, but in their early years they seemed poised to take a place alongside the major quartets of yesteryear, and its violist, Misha Amory, who certainly looked to be the "baby" of Tuesday's sextet, really did seem to be especially alert to his colleagues as well as productively decisive in his own part.

This was good for the Mozart quintet, with Ashkenasi and Amory playing first violin and viola and Krosnick the cellist; and maybe not so good for the Kreiser Quartet, with Steinhardt playing first violin and Tenenbom and Emerson cellist David Finckel (who happens also to be the CMS's co-director, with his wife, pianist Wu Han) the violist and cellist. The Kreisler team did fine with the jaunty finale, whose thread is kind of hard to lose, which is presumably why that movement has been in my head since, and earned a slot in Friday night's preview.

THE KREISLER QUARTET IS WELL WORTH REVIVING, BUT --

What we heard was the 1935 recording made by the composer plus players recruited for the occasion. The gap between what the "Kreisler String Quartet" did and what I heard Tuesday night becomes fairly sizable in the earlier movements, for which the composer's team made much compelling cases. And so I thought today we might hear the whole of a piece that certainly merits wider play, but only by performers with a strong sense of where the music is going and why.

KREISLER: String Quartet in A minor

i. Fantasia: Moderato; Allegro moderato

ii. Scherzo

iii. Introduction and Romance: Allegretto; Andante con moto

iv. Finale: Retrospection

"Kreisler String Quartet": Fritz Kreisler and Thomas Petre violins; William Primrose, viola; Lauri Kennedy, cello. EMI, recorded April 1935

(As I mentioned Friday, I see that Naxos has recently released a new recording of the Kreisler Quartet by, of all people, the Fine Arts Quartet! That's definitely on my "to hear" list.)

PERHAPS MY FAVORITE ENTRY ON THE CMS PROGRAM --

. . . was the selection of those half-dozen miniature violin duets by Luciano Berio, music I didn't know at all. CMS annotator Richard Roddy explains:

In 1979, Leonardo Pinzauti, the Italian musicologist, music critic, and editor of Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana, suggested to Berio that he should compose a series of duets for violin that would serve performers as both teaching material and as an introduction to contemporary styles. . . . Each was titled with the name of a composer, performer, scholar or personal acquaintance, perhaps as a sort of musical snapshot.

I suppose I shouldn't say this, but I was relieved to find that the numbers we heard don't sound much like any of the Berio music I do know. We've already heard the last of the pieces that violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi and Arnold Steinhardt played, the lovely Aldo. Here's their next-to-last selection, the duet named for Leonardo Pinzauti himself, again played by our 2011 Polish competition violin duo of Ania Górecka and Zosia Konieczna.



You'll note that the second violinist basically plays scale figures while the first violinist weaves spells around them. This nicely suited the musical personalities of Steinhardt (second) and Ashkenasi (first), and the six pieces they chose made a lovely group.

WHAT ABOUT THE FINE ARTS QUARTET'S PIANO COLLEAGUE?

Xiayin Wang wasn't even a name to me. She seems to have a strong solo career under way, but then, so do a number of younger pianists whose work doesn't interest me much when I get to hear it. She's also done a fair amount of chamber music, including the Schumann and Franck Quintets with the Fine Arts last season and now the Saint-Saëns. She's made a number of solo recordings, and online you can find a number of solo works as well as a nice performance of the first movement of the Schumann Quintet with the Cuarteto Latinoamericano.

She certainly got my attention. After the Fine Arts Quartet opened the program with Mozart K. 421, she played the set of five Sarcasms, Op. 17, from 1921-23, Prokofiev's student years. We tend to slap labels like "impudent" and "nose-thumbing" on his music of this period, and correspondingly to take in stride, or even expect, performances that have those qualities. A set of Sarcasms would seem right in line, and probably people who've never looked at the music could think that this live performance of No. 1, marked "Tempestoso," by the much-admired Marc-André Hamelin is just the ticket.



But if you look at the music, you see that percussive hammering accounts for only a small part of it. Prokofiev's varied articulation markings, and in particular the careful gradations of dynamics, with as much soft music as loud, and clearly marked extremes in both directions, very soft and very loud, suggest a much wider range of expression than you'll hear in any of the YouTube clips.

Of course thinking of the music in the terms suggested by the composer's markings makes it a lot harder to play. Playing softly is hard, for one thing, and playing really softly is even harder, especially in the context of so much musical proclamation.

György Sándor did somewhat better in his long-ago (c1966) Vox recording:


And in her Thursday-night performance of the Sarcasms, Xiayin Wang did much better still, really delighting in the welter of kinds of sounds the composer butted up against each other, and finding lyricism as well as raucous amusement. She really does have a remarkable control of touch, or rather an enormous range of kinds of touch, all under strong-willed control but also commanded with a winning feel for musical line and color.

All of which was totally to the point in the early Saint-Saëns A minor Piano Quintet, Op. 14, of which we heard a student performance of the haunting slow movement Friday night. I wish I could offer you the performance I heard Wang and the Fine Arts boys give Thursday night, but I'd at least like you to hear more of the music. Here's the first movement. Note, for example, the melting lyricism of the secondary theme as it emerges at about 1:58.




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