What is it about the sound of a string quartet? How can just four instruments—three, really, since the violin is doubled—cover such a wide musical range and produce such varying moods? The possibilities when two violins, a viola, and a cello are speaking to each other seem, and perhaps are, infinite: not at all limited by the familial resemblance, as the look of the instruments would suggest, but increasing exponentially with each new encounter, each movement, each composer, each century. A medium that seems built on the idea of limitation and bareness turns out to be large enough to contain just about anything. And yet the aura of stripped-down starkness, of countable participants and individually perceptible parts, is a large part of the string quartet’s appeal. It turns out to be human-sized—and not just the size of a single human (which often seems too small) nor the size of an orchestral mob (which sometimes feels too large), but a nice “just-right” size, as Goldilocks would have said to the other three members of her quartet.
Last spring I heard eight separate string quartet performances in just over two months, beginning with the Brentano Quartet in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall in March, and ending in May with a free Brahms quartet put on by members of the San Francisco Symphony prior to a masterful performance of the German Requiem. I was not on any kind of quartet marathon; I was not even consciously seeking out the form. I just kept choosing the concerts I most wanted to hear, and in the course of these two months I ended up listening to eighteen different pieces composed for string quartet. It would have been twenty, except people kept reprogramming Brahms’s Quartet No. 3 as if it were the heraldic device of the season. Not that I’m complaining: to hear this nineteenth-century classic performed in succession by the Emerson Quartet, the Takacs Quartet, and the San Francisco pickup group was an irreplaceable lesson in listening, for where one group would emphasize the odd, disjunctive moments, another would go for regularity and understatement; in those three concerts, the very nature of the viola (the instrument at the heart of this Brahms quartet) seemed to alter before my very eyes, and ears.
The oldest composition I heard was by Haydn, the father of the string quartet. (It’s hard to believe that something so inevitable-seeming has been around only since the eighteenth century, but the string quartet turns out to be a mere baby—or perhaps a rambunctious adolescent— compared to most other musical formats.) The newest was by Jörg Widmann, a young German composer who is only in his mid-thirties, and whose rhythmically entrancing String Quartet No. 4 had its U.S. premiere at Weill Recital Hall this March. Both the Haydn and the Widmann were played by the Vogler Quartet, a group I’d never heard of before, though they must be pretty famous in Germany, since the up-and-coming Widmann wrote his Fourth Quartet specifically for them. When they rounded out their Carnegie program with a beautiful rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 59, No. 2 (the second of the strikingly alive “Razumovsky” quartets, which in this instance seemed to have been written just for the Voglers), I became a complete convert, and rushed home to order their CDs.
One of the Razumovsky quartets also concluded a Beethoven performance by the Alexander Quartet, only this time it was No. 3, appearing last on a cunningly designed program that began with the early Quartet in A Major (Opus 18, No. 5) and then moved on to the thrilling Opus 127. The Alexanders, playing at Baruch College, had actually undertaken a whole Beethoven cycle this year, but I only managed to catch the last two concerts, the first of which (on a Monday) was so terrific that I instantly bought a ticket to the final concert, that Friday. Nor was I disappointed, for if the Alexander Quartet’s playing of Opus 127 had been a revelation, so was their rendering of Opus 130 with its two alternate endings, the Grosse Fugue and its smaller replacement. Nothing in the quartet literature of any century is quite so hair-raisingly amazing as these late Beethoven Quartets; when you hear twentieth-century masters like Shostakovich and Bartok exploring the form, you can’t help feeling they are still working out the ideas Beethoven left behind.
As it happens, I was able to hear both Shostakovich and Bartok in this two-month period, each represented by his final quartet: Shostakovich’s Fifteenth was played by the Brentanos, and Bartok’s Sixth by a very young group called the Vertigo Quartet. I love the Shostakovich and have heard it many times, including two live performances by the Emerson Quartet during the past two years. (I missed, alas, the Alexander Quartet’s Shostakovich cycle, and I spent the early part of the first Beethoven evening mentally kicking myself for the omission. But one simply can’t hear everything, and I suppose that is a good thing, in that there is always something left to long for.) Perhaps my prior attachment to the Shostakovich made me unable to appreciate the Brentanos’ performance on its own merits. They are a highly accomplished group, but in this case their verve and professionalism seemed to get in the way of the bleak, despairing tone of the piece. It is a composition that requires an almost theatrical ability on the part of its performers, asking them to submerge their individual musical talents in the service of its dark, painful, mortality-contemplating vision; and the Brentanos, to my mind, failed to do this.
The Vertigos, on the other hand, were completely up to the demands of the Bartok. I have been following this group for about a year, ever since I discovered them at Bargemusic in the spring of 2007; now, in April of 2008, I was watching the last performance in their Bargemusic residency, and that was sad in itself. But the deep, lucid sadness they brought to the Sixth Quartet in D Major was something else again. As always with this ensemble of very young players (they graduated from the Curtis Institute in 2005), I was amazed at how persuasively they entered into the death-laden atmosphere of the music. I have heard them do this before—first with Shostakovich’s Twelfth Quartet, and then with Beethoven’s Opus 131—but each time it moves me anew.
This time they kindly relocated Bartok’s Sixth from the end of the program to the middle, so that we could recover our spirits during the intermission and be sent on our way with a rousing, delightful rendition of Dvorak’s “American” Quartet in F Major. But addicted as I am to the Dvorak (I probably listen to it at least once a month in either the Takacs or Jerusalem Quartet version), it was the Bartok I kept thinking about after the concert was over. To focus in on an emotion even as one is pulling back from it: that is what Bartok managed to do with his sadness in the face of death, and that is what the Vertigos did with his resulting quartet. How appropriate that they should be named, not just after the Hitchcock movie, but after the “vertigo” shot itself, in which the camera simultaneously zooms forward and dollies backward—and how pleasing to discover that the expansive medium of the string quartet, in addition to everything else it can do, can accomplish this maneuver as well.
Wendy Lesser, founding editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of eight books, most recently Room for Doubt. Her next book will be about Shostakovich’s string quartets.
