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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 18, 2018
Musical taste is — obviously — a very personal thing; it can also, at least in my own experience, be a rather strange one: I can, for example, think of several composers who failed to resonate with me until a single performance somehow unlocked their music.
I can also think of quite a few individual works for which I had admiration and respect, but not love — again, until a certain performance tipped the balance.
Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings is a case in point: I had known the work for many years, possessed several recordings and attended numerous performances, but it was not until I came across Evgeny Mravinsky's recording, made in Leningrad in 1949 (to say that this was not a happy time for musicians in the Soviet Union would be to seriously understate the case). Something about that performance suddenly revealed the soul of the music to me, with the result that it is now high on my personal "do not miss" list.
Which is no doubt why the presence of the Tchaikovsky on Wednesday night's gala programme is what persuaded me that, as I was only going to be able to attend one of the last two Quartet Fest West presentations, it had better be that one. Besides, the Tuesday programme included one of Beethoven's "Razumovsky" quartets, more music for which I am still awaiting the performance to transform respect into adoration. (Perhaps Tuesday's would have been the one; alas, I shall never know.)
Nor was I disappointed. By my count, for the Tchaikovsky the stage fielded some twenty-six players and — be still, my beating heart! — the single largest section was the violas. All of them with the exception of the cellists, were standing and together they produced a huge sound, a sound the listeners could immerse themselves in and surrender to the glorious music-making.
Jerzy Kaplanek led the performance, which was excellent. The opening, that great outpouring of sound, was taken quite slowly but was nonetheless highly effective and the succeeding allegro moderato was very energetic, with considerable attention to much fine detail which is sometimes lost in all the excitement.
The waltz — and Tchaikovsky wrote some of the best waltzes ever — was delicious, with some nicely-managed rubato. The opening of the slow movement is one of the saddest passages I know and proved deeply moving; the intensity of the entire movement was deeply affecting and the violas (all seven of them) were particularly effective.
If anyone was still not convinced of Tchaikovsky's genius, the finale would surely have established it beyond any shadow of a doubt, as the lyrical slow introduction slowly accelerates and transforms itself magically into the almost boisterous allegro con spirito, which here positively fizzed along. The sudden return of the work's fulsome opening is another stroke of genius, making clear (at least in as good a performance as this) the thematic connections between the beginning and end of the piece.
I gather that the decision to include the student festival participants in the performance was made fairly late and rehearsal time minimal. While there were one or two minor blemishes of intonation and ensemble (but if you blinked, you would have missed them) the fullness of the sound and the sheer energy the young players contributed to the performance made those blemishes seem even less relevant.
A truly wonderful close to the evening.
As the Tchaikovsky has no place for a harpsichord, the largest grouping on the stage was for Vivaldi's Concerto for Four Violins in B minor, RV580, which is the tenth concerto in his Op.3: L'estro armonico ("the harmonic inspiration"), his first published set of concertos (twelve in all). Parenthetically, I cannot help but wonder precisely when the "standard" of twelve works to a published opus (several by Vivaldi, Handel's Op.6 set of Concertos Grosso) became six (e.g. most of Haydn's string quartets) and what the reaction of the older composers would have been. I like to imagine Antonio looking down dismissively, saying "wimps!".
Vivaldi's Op.3 was extremely popular in his time, with at least twenty printings in Amsterdam alone, as well as five in Paris and two in London. Furthermore Bach himself was inspired to transcribe no fewer than six of the concertos for keyboards, including, most famously, the B minor for four harpsichords (in A minor).
This has long been one of my favourite Vivaldi concertos and, once again, I was anything but disappointed by the performance, which featured the four violinists of the Lafayette and Penderecki quartets as soloists and the legendary Colin Tilney providing a brilliant harpsichord continuo.
The entire concerto boasted a marvellously full yet never inappropriately lush sound and, in the outer movements, an exuberance that was impossible to resist. The slow movement was stately and elegant, with a slight eeriness to the larghetto section.
The evening opened with just four players on stage: the Penderecki String Quartet, who gave us the last of Haydn's Op.50, the "Prussian" quartets, so-called because of their dedication to King Frederick William II of Prussia.
The Pendereckis produced a warm relaxed sound for the opening movement, with a somewhat more turbulent development section; I loved the way they relaxed into the recapitulation.
The slow movement featured some nice inner details and the minuet was forceful, but not overly so.
The finale's opening gesture on the first violin (rapidly alternating the same note on open and fingered strings, a technique known as "bariolage") reminds some of the croaking of a frog, hence the quartet's sobriquet. I can't say I can hear it myself, but then again I have not spent a great deal of time among the amphibians. Here it gave a propulsive vitality to the performance, which veered close to, but never crossed, the line separating the merely forceful from the inappropriately hard-driven.
This was, even by my frequently unforgiving standards, very fine Haydn playing.
There was more Haydn to follow, but the String Quintet in C, MH187, came from the pen of Joseph's younger brother Michael. For this the Lafayette Quartet were joined by Yariv Aloni.
Despite some highly felicitous touches — I am particularly thinking of the violins in parallel and the violas' phrase-passing in the opening movement — there is no doubt that Michael was the lesser of the Haydns.
It would, though, be hard to imagine a more persuasive performance, the word "charming" appears in my notebook (more than once), but then so do the phrases "by the numbers" (the first movement's development section), "not especially distinctive" (the minuet) and even "exciting passagework but a bit mindless".
All of which criticism was directed at the music, rather than the performance itself, which was immaculate.
Indeed, it left me suspecting that, had Michael had a different surname, he might be more highly-regarded today.
Alexander Borodin must surely be the only Russian chemist ever to compose a Broadway musical.
Of course I exaggerate, but the most memorable melodies in 1955's Kismet were indeed adapted by Robert Wright and George Forrest from the music of Borodin.
The second half of Wednesday's concert opened with the Nocturne from Borodin's String Quartet No.2, which provided the melody for "And This Is My Beloved" in the musical.
The Lafayette Quartet played it exquisitely, with the "big tune" allowing Pamela Highbaugh-Aloni's eloquent musicianship full reign. The ethereal close was magical.
Many (most?) so-called gala events frequently fail to live up to their billing. This was most emphatically the exception to prove the rule.
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