I have often heard Maurice Ravel's F major string quartet as the
centerpiece or conclusion of a recital, but last night was the first
time I heard it introduce the program. The occasion was a performance
by the Picasso Quartet (violinists Alisa Rose and Natasha Makhijani,
violist Alexa Beattie, and cellist Michelle Kwon) at the Berkeley Piano
Club under the egis of the Club's Emerging Artists Fund. The Quartet
was formed in March of 2008; so a nit-picker might argue that they have
already "emerged" (and probably wonder what a string quartet is doing
at a piano club). However, it would be fair to say that the Quartet is
still in the process of finding its voice and building a repertoire to
suit that voice; and it is important that there are philanthropic
sources to support these early stages of development.
Ravel's
quartet tends to be one of the fundamentals in any string quartet's
repertoire, but the Picasso demonstrated that it is an excellent way to
begin a performance by an ensemble that is probably new to most of the
members of the audience. Its four movements range across a wide variety
of moods, but it begins with a gesture that can easily be taken as warm
and welcoming. Having almost politely invited the listener's
attention, the music proceeds to present the ensemble with a broad range
of opportunities for solo voices, "conversational" counterpoint,
harmonic agreement, and auditory exploration of the sonic potential of
the instruments, taken both individually and in combinations. It allows
the ensemble to say, as it were, "This is what we are, and this is what
we do" with just the right combination of virtuosic display and
"straight talk."
If there were a few problems with intonation in
the Picasso performance of this quartet, those problems quickly receded
behind an overall recognition of the expository opportunities that the
music provides. Ravel may best be known for his orchestration skills,
but it is not often recognized that those skills are just as necessary
for chamber music. He has a keen understanding of how to work with a
palette that may be small in size but almost unlimited in the diversity
of sounds that each of the component instruments can produce. While
other composers may structure their climaxes around harmonic or
contrapuntal resolutions, Ravel's climaxes are often cued by a "color
shift;" and the Picasso's sensitivity to what I like to call "the sound itself"
made these climaxes particularly effective. Having thus secured a
rhetorical strategy for establishing the moments of priority, the
ensemble could then lead the listener through the large and the small of
Ravel's overall architecture, demonstrating an ability to bring
freshness to one of the most familiar string quartets.
The Picasso
String Quartet was actually formed to present the premiere of a string
quartet that David Garner completed in 2008. This was the second work
on last night's program, and Garner was present to provide some
introductory remarks. Most important was his observation that the work
was "about" conflict, which he reinforced with a sort of laundry list of
the different musical resources that could be engaged to represent
conflict. There is, of course, nothing new in conflict as an underlying
concept. The twelve violin concertos of Antonio Vivaldi published as
his Opus 8 were assigned a title implying a "contest" between harmony
and invention; and just about every subsequent composer of note has
addressed the problem of when resources work against each other and when
they unite in purpose.
Fortunately, Garner could see that there
are always new ways to approach such an old problem; and he had some
clever ways of seasoning his own pursuits with dashes of wit to entice
the listener and then maintain attention. Indeed, in the overall scope
of music history, Garner may be the first string quartet composer
comfortable with a skillful sense of wit since Béla Bartók. Even in the
third, Pomposo, movement, whose tempo marking almost telegraphs Dmitri
Shostakovich's proclivity for martial gestures viewed through a
jaundiced eye, it is an appreciation of Bartók's (often concealed)
capacity for playfulness the moderates the overall structure.
This
is a quartet with much to say, and one cannot expect to keep up with
all of it on a first exposure. However, the Picasso was offered this as
"their" string quartet; and their personal embrace of it greatly
facilitates negotiating its wealth of ideas while, at the same time,
whetting the appetite for further listening opportunities. One could do
far worse than chase after every opportunity to hear this ensemble if
it also leads to further acquaintance with Garner's composition.
Having
focused on both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for the first
half of the program, the Picasso reverted to the nineteenth after the
intermission. They performed Felix Mendelssohn's final complete string
quartet, his Opus 80 in F minor. I have suggested in the past that
Mendelssohn's music can be sensitive to the context in which it is
presented, citing,
as an example, how his early Opus 13 quartet could be easily
"overwhelmed" in the wake of Franz Schubert at his most passionate.
Last night Mendelssohn had no problems at all with context. This voice
was clearly differentiated from those that would follow in subsequent
centuries; and, while he was so prolific in his Allegro writing that
there is a tendency to lump it all together as one pile of "busy work,"
the Picasso performed his Allegro movements with a sense of urgency that
made it clear that this was not music to be "lumped together" with
anything else. Furthermore, the final Allegro molto concludes with one
of those flourishes that provides the perfect rhetorical approach to
concluding an entire recital program. So, if part of that process of
"emergence" is, as I suggested, the ability of the ensemble to "find its
voice," then the "emergence" of the Picasso Quartet is definitely off
to a good start; and we should all be eager to keep track of how their
journey proceeds.
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