MiV Home
Emily Carr House
August 28, 2014
The concert program featured string quartets by Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, and carried the headline "Musical Bouquets for Emily". So what does the quintessential BC artist Emily Carr share with the archetypical Russian composers Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov? Viola player Mieka Michaux offered a clue by introducing each movement with an apt quote from Carr's classic "Hundreds and Thousands".
Thus an excerpt from Carr put us in the right mood for Rimsky-Korsakov's Fugue "In the Monastery": "What is beauty? [...] God, the divine in us calling to the divine in all else, the one essence and substance". Here is a simple main theme repeated over and over again, but each time turned around to show a different and ever more divine textural facet. The Fugue was originally intended as the fourth movement of R-K's String Quartet No.2. However, the composer declared the Quartet to be unworthy of publishing and re-packaged the first three movements into his Sinfonietta, Op.31, leaving the fourth movement behind as a plaintive yet beautiful musical orphan.
The fabric and timbre of Borodin's String Quartet No.2 has much in common with R-K's Fugue. A quote from Carr's book set the tone for the Allegro: "The pliability of growth is marvellous. The limbs that have life in them bend and sway and toss but they do not break. Just the dead ones snap. Life springs back joyously."
The following Carr quote introduced the Scherzo: "Everything is eternally on the quiver with wind. [...] I think trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises." An unlikely adaptation of the theme became the song "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" in the 1953 musical "Kismet".
The Notturno: "The mountains were high. [...] The sky went high." Here again, "Kismet" picked up the main theme and made it into the song "And This is My Beloved".
The Finale: "I walked in the woods tonight among the cedars and the rain and it was heavenly sweet. [...] The rain had beaten the bushes across the path and the stream was noisy and swollen". On a more light-hearted note, the movement has an obvious and humorous question-and-answer structure. Initially the two violins are posing the (innocent? frivolous?) question and the viola joins with the cello to offer the (ponderous? reproachful?) answer. Later, the roles are reversed, and at one point the question and answer overlap, as if engaged in a frenzied argument.
Compared to recordings of the above works by other string quartets, the tempo was just right. Play them too fast, and the lyricism is lost. Play them too slowly, and an element of turgidity creeps in.
It is not every day that an audience is allowed to sit so close to the string players that they almost get stabbed by the bows. Health and safety concerns aside, this highly intimate setting in the former parlour of Emily Carr House gave the eighteen listeners a unique opportunity to observe the internal dynamics of a quartet. So, for example, the manner in which the musicians prompt each other with quick glances and subtle nods. Then there is the language of the entire body. While Büyükçelen was practically dancing to the rhythm of the music, her fellow violinist Balzer adopted a more reserved demeanour. Michaux rocked almost imperceptibly back and forth, and Money the cellist was a rock, plain and simple. It is tempting to conclude that the body language is constrained by the type of instrument being played, but this is not necessarily true. A cello soloist in Moscow almost fell off his chair once while playing Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1.
So much for visual observation. From the point of view of musical appreciation, such close proximity is perhaps less than optimal. When we look at a clock, are we mainly interested in knowing the time, or in the intricate turning of the cogwheels behind the clock-face? When listeners sit right next to the musicians, they risk being caught up in the mechanisms that produce the music. The sound of multiple instruments requires some degree of acoustic blending, as happens in a concert hall, before its true soul can be explored.
For a city of its size, Victoria is fortunate to have such an active music life. I hope to have many more opportunities to hear the Emily Carr String Quartet in action. An interesting article about spirited violinist Müge Büyükçelen appeared in the August 21 edition of the Times Colonist. Biographies of all four members of the ensemble can be found on the Emily Carr String Quartet website.
MiV Home