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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
March 10, 2012
If, as the old saying has it, a string quartet consists of "a good violinist, a bad violinist, a failed violinist and someone who hates violinists" then the Lafayette String Quartet have been masquerading under false pretenses this last quarter of a century.
A few seconds of listening to them play suffices to dispel the notion that any of the four suffer from any technical shortcomings.
As to the rest; well, the range of interpersonal dynamics displayed by successful quartets ranges widely - I'll leave to you the decision as to which is the sublime and which the ridiculous - from the Quartetto Italiano, in whose thirty-five year existence the lone female member, second violinist Elisa Pegreffi, was, in turn, married to each of her three colleagues; to the Budapest Quartet, who notoriously did not even speak to one another outside of rehearsals and who travelled separately between engagements.
By contrast, the Lafayettes are clearly the best of friends and also clearly on excellent terms with their colleagues at the School of Music, several of whom they generously invited to participate in Saturday night's concert, the penultimate in their series celebrating twenty-five years as a quartet and twenty at UVic.
Nor were the quartet content to present an evening of "old favourites"; in the event I suspect that many of the audience were hearing all of the music for the first time.
Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes was composed in the USA in 1919 as the result of a commission from Zimro, a Jewish ensemble who had emigrated from the Soviet Union. The thematic material is drawn from a notebook of Jewish folksongs given to him by the ensemble.
The unusual instrumentation - clarinet, piano and string quartet - was dictated by Zimro's own makeup, yet Prokofiev quickly dispenses with any sense of the merely novel in a work whose emotional contradictions seem rooted in both the Jewish and Russian characters.
Patricia Kostek and Bruce Vogt joined the Lafayettes for a very fine performance of the overture, perfectly paced, with exceptional balances.
To call David Baker's Sonata for Tuba and String Quartet unusual would be stating the blindingly obvious, but it would certainly be interesting to know why he chose this particular combination and this particular title (why not call it a quintet, for instance?)
While I doubt very much if the work will ever be a popular favourite, Eugene Dowling and the Lafayettes gave a thoroughly persuasive performance of what is, I suspect, far from easy music to play.
As befits the music of a composer born in 1931, the work is suffused with slightly angular melodic lines and edgy harmonies, with one movement - the second, Easy Swing "blues" - nodding decisively towards the world of jazz.
Of course the finale - Fast - was going to end with a single subterranean note from the tuba and f course it did, but its predictability did not make it any the less amusing.
Charles Camille Saint-Saëns began his musical career as a radical, ardently championing the music of Liszt and Wagner, and ended it as an ultra-conservative, bemoaning the influence of Strauss and Debussy.
Of his hundreds of compositions, relatively few today are still performed and I cannot recall ever having heard his Septet, Op.65 before.
Scored for the deliciously unlikely combination of trumpet, piano, string quartet and doublebass, the septet closed the "official" programme of Saturday's concert. Louis Ranger, Arthur Rowe and Mary Rannie joined the quartet for a delightful performance of a most amiable work which seemed (and, alas how rare this is) much too short.
Tempos seemed - like Baby Bear's porridge - just right, as indeed were balances - no small feat in view of the particular instrumental combination.
But it was the sheer exuberance of the playing which swept all before it.
Finally, we had a little "mystery piece", which turned out to be a sort of staged parody of Amadeus.
While Ann Elliott-Goldschmid as Mozart (what I believe they call a "trouser" role) directed her colleagues, violinist Hannah Burton and bassist Rannie in one of Wolfgang's serenades (beautifully, so beautifully played, I could happily have listened to it sans anything else), Lanny Pollet depicted the insanely jealous Salieri, Michael Longton tottered aimless around the stage as, well, I wasn't entirely sure what, except that I'm pretty sure it was he who delivered the wine into which Salieri tipped the poison, and Christopher Butterfield, appearing as playwright Peter Shaffer, broke down the "fourth wall" (or do I mean "first ceiling"?) by addressing the audience directly.
It was all good, clean fun and provided a most congenial end to a splendid evening.
The Lafayette String Quartet are surely one of the treasures of this city.
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