May 21 concert of Close Encounters with Music concert at The Mahaiwe Theatre in Great Barrington
Program: Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F (1903); Ruth Crawford Seeger, String Quartet (1931), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Souvenir de Florence, op. 70, for String Sextet
String quartets, more than other chamber ensembles, have collective personalities. These develop through a varying circumstances: They may be brought together as conservatory students, coached by a faculty ensemble; formed through an audition process that seeks not only proficiency but compatibility, both musical and personal; or formed with paricular repertory preferences in mind. The members of successful quartets share a common vision regarding things like playing style, tone production, rhythmic feel, personality and interpersonal skills, and willingness to commit a significant chunk of a career to playing chamber music rather than soloing. And they often play together for very long periods of time. (The Guarneri lasted 45 years with only one membership change.) Even when one or two members are replaced, the new ones can adapt themselves to the group identity and the personality lives on. When the stars align, the result can be transcendant; but each successful quartet will reveal its own collective character. Within this past year, I have reviewed the Danish String Quartet at Tanglewood and the Brentano Quartet at South Mountain.
On Sunday, we had the Escher Quartet, presented at the Mahaiwe under the auspices of Close Encounters with Music. The Danish Quartet, who will be returning this summer (on August 2; take note) has a lean, contemporary, extremely homogenous sound with minimal vibrato; strong attack; a penchant for biting accents; and even, at times, a cold ferocity. The Brentano has a highly differentiated sound, with a thin, almost wiry first violin; a lush, rich second violin; and lower instruments that bridge the gap and accommodate to pull together a unified sound. The Escher, in contrast to both, has a warm rich sound that is shared by all the instruments to the extent that it is often necessary to look to see who is playing which line. Especially in the Ravel Quartet, lines would pass seamlessly from one instrument to the next. That said, it is still possible to find individual character among the members: First violinist Adam Barnett-Hart seems to be the sparkplug who energizes the group’s performances, while Pierre Lapointe’s viola sound is remarkably rich, mellow, and songful. (His viola is exceptionally large, which helps.) The Eschers share a natural-sounding vibrato to enrich the sonority without exaggeration or sentimentality. The result is a mellowness of approach that is flexible enough to accommodate the widely varied fare that they offered on Sunday afternoon, encompassing the complex intensity of the Crawford quartet, the fairy-dust magic of Ravel, and Tchaikovsky’s romantic red-blooded romanticism.
The most interesting and unusual item on the program was Ruth Crawford Seeger’s innovative quartet of 1931. It is worth reviewing her career, since this pioneering woman modernist and her music are still unfamiliar to most audiences. Born in Ohio in 1901, Crawford pursued her studies in piano and composition in Chicago, where she met avant-garde composers Henry Cowell and Dane Rudyhar as well as the poet Carl Sandburg (for whose children she babysat). In 1929, she moved to New York City, attended the MacDowell Colony, and spent time in Berlin and Paris on a Guggenheim. Back in New York, she studied composition with Charles Seeger who was to become her husband. He had been Cowell’s teacher in California and was part of a group of avant-garde musicians who also leaned left on the political spectrum. They eagerly explored new means of musical organization including atonality, dissonant counterpoint, non-Western scales, complex rhythms, and structural use of dynamics and tone color. Channeling the excitement of this innovative moment, Crawford produced an enduring masterpiece, her String Quartet (1931). This short, densely organized work demonstrates the viability of many of these new techniques by synthesizing them into a highly charged, emotionally intense, inventively varied discourse among the four strings. Each movement virtually reinvents the idea of a string quartet.
In the first movement, the instruments are at their most dissociated, each following a different rhythmic character and each shifting wildly within itself. Beats are subdivided into three, four, five, six, or seven, and if two parts coincide rhythmically, it is for a very brief and unpredictable amount of time, the diverse textual layers always complementing each other. The music is atonal (not organized around a scale or key), and the notes feel like beads of water dancing around in a hot griddle. Although the radically contrapuntal effect is wild and exhilarating, one can sense an underlying principal of organization at work. Knowing the music of Elliott Carter from the 1950s on, one can recognize here a powerful forerunner. The second movement, played without a pause, is an electric scherzo in which the running line is fragmented into short bits that migrate from one instrument to another, fittng together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Like the first movement, the lines move unpredictably between very small to very large intervals.
The third movement, Andante, is somewhat better known, and it exists in a version for string orchestra with an added bass part. Crawford wrote that the melody should pass note by note from one instrument to the next by a unique process: All the instruments play continuously in sustained notes, each one marked dynamically to swell and subside, arriving at its loudest point to contribute to the collective linear melody that runs from beginning to end. The form of this melody seems to be submerged below a watery surface with waves continuously lapping, causing parts of the image to waver and bleed into each other. The movement develops as the dynamic level gradually increases and the number of parts multiplies, starting at two and eventually reaching a massive eight-part climax triple-forte before reversing course and gradually dying away. It is an extraordinary and unprecedented piece, one that left a lasting impression on future generations of American composers.
The final movement takes yet another approach to quartet writing: It alternates short bursts in the first violin against running unison lines in the other three. At first these forces alternate, but as the violin’s statements grow longer and more varied, the two textural elements overlap and are pretty soon running simultaneously; but not for long before the lower three parts start to falter, and the gaps within their line grow larger, leaving more time for the solos of the first violin to dominate with an expansive discourse. Having reached a point where they have exchanged roles, the antagonists reverse this process and the work ends as it began. Is there a covert social message here?
Frustrated at the attitude of publishers who were skeptical about promoting a woman composer, Crawford returned to Europe where she met Alban Berg and Bela Bartok. She returned and married Seeger; then she traded her career as a musical pioneer for that of a folklorist, as she and Seeger travelled with their children (all of whom became eminent folk musicians) through the Appalachians collecting folk songs, which she eventually arranged and published in several important collections. (Her life is chronicled in an excellent biography by Judith Tick entitled “Ruth Crawford Seeger: a Composer’s Search for an American Music”.) Only at the end of her short life did she return to her innovative personal composition career; she died tragically at the age of 51. The Escher musicians performed this difficult work with great dedication, mastering all the challenges of coordination in a way that was totally convincing. They clearly know this score as a whole, and the homogeneity of their sound worked to the benefit of the special character of this work.
The more familiar works on the program received satisfying performances. The Ravel is one of the most popular works in the quartet literature, in danger of being over-exposed; but this performance was distinguished by a slightly understated, subtle eloquence that mustered energy where needed, particularly in the final movement. The combination of Ravel and the Eschers resulted in a performance of glowing beauty. For the Tchaikovsky, Daniel Panner’s viola and Yehuda Hanani’s cello were added to reform the ensemble into a miniature string orchestra. This was a muscular performance that, at times, showed a roughness previously absent. “Souvenir de Florence” displays the composer’s version of classical form, following the four-movement prototype perfectly. The bustling first movement adhered precisely to sonata form; its second theme hints at Italian influence with the first violin’s sustained tone off-set by delicate rising scales in the lower instruments, a moment that may call to listener’s memories the transition to the love-theme in “Romeo and Juliet,” another of the composer’s Italian evocations. The plucking in the closing theme suggests a mandolin or guitar more than a balalaika. A slight deviation from the classical model involved replacing the minuet or scherzo with a Russian folk-like melody (or a real one?) in the first viola with plucked chords in second viola and second cello. This movement adheres to the straight-forward form of a classical third movement. The modal tune resembles the folk song that Tchaikovsky used in the finale of his Fourth Symphony (“In the forest stands a little birch tree.”) The final movement shoe-horns a short-winded fugato into a bustling, slightly over-stuffed form. It was the second movement that most clearly indicated the Italian provenance of this work, composed in Florence on vacation. Here, a lovely aria in the first violin unwinds, accompanied by the guitar-like pizzicatos of the rest of the ensemble. The result is pure enchantment, Nutcracker-Suite style.
