In this horrible-weather month that New Yorkers have been calling “spring” (but that we Californians would have no hesitation in labeling “winter”), Monday the 20th stood out as a particularly unpleasant night. After taunting us with a hint of summer warmth on the preceding Friday and Saturday, the climate had turned nasty again, with a cold, pelting rain that chilled the bones and made all ventures outdoors seem pointless. I wanted nothing more than to huddle inside by the radiator, but I had committed myself to attending the always-overbooked Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center—personally committed myself, by wangling two tickets from the Movado Hour’s endearing curator, Pedja Muzajevic, but also morally committed myself, in the sense that two deserving, music-loving souls could have sat in those free seats if my husband and I had chosen in advance to stay home. So we grudgingly covered ourselves in rain-repellent equipment and set out.
And it’s a lucky thing we did. I mean, it’s not as if we were taking a great risk: the Movado Hour is always pleasant, and not only because its structural outlines—free tickets, free drinks, a cabaret-style setting, and a single intermissionless hour of professionally performed music—conspire to make it so. With his wide connections in the music world, Muzajevic (who is himself an excellent pianist) has managed over the years to lure in an astonishing array of chamber-music performers, from the youthful Brooklyn Riders to the eminent Bella Davidovich. But even against that high standard, Monday night’s performance by the St. Lawrence String Quartet proved to be something special.
I have heard and liked this group in other venues, but there is no comparison between those more standard concerts and the way these four accomplished string players let loose, technically and emotionally, in the smaller, more intimate arena of the Movado Hour. I’ve now heard them twice in that setting—in the first Movado concert I ever attended, back in the fall of 2005, and in this latest one—and each time the experience was galvanizing.
This time, the program began with an intense, very specific, and quite moving rendition of Mendelssohn’s last composition, Opus 80, the string quartet he wrote just after his beloved sister’s death. I had heard this same quartet pretty recently, in last year’s “late-style” concert by the Brentanos at Weill Hall, but this time it was like a different piece of music, more alive and immediate than anything I normally associate with that composer. It was as if the St. Lawrence players had located the Beethoven side of Mendelssohn and proceeded to bring it out. So already, two minutes into the first Allegro movement, I had forgotten about the rain and the cold and my clammy feet, and had been transported into the here-and-now of a great performance.
And then came the pleasure of a complete surprise. For the second half of their program, the SLSQ gave us the Quartet No. 3 by R. Murray Schafer, a living Canadian composer of whom I (and, I’m willing to bet, at least half the audience) had never heard. The performance—from which the piece itself is inseparable, because it is the kind of piece that can only exist in live performance—was like nothing I had seen or heard before. Beginning with the cellist bowing alone onstage in complete darkness, the quartet gradually lightened, and expanded, to include the other three instruments, as their players strolled in from all directions in the course of the first movement. The entire foursome then engaged in a wild second movement that was like a cross between a Bartok quartet (seasoned with a bit of George Crumb) and an Inuit shouting match—their bows looked as frayed as their voices sounded, by the end of it. Finally, we got a trance-like last movement in which the long, slow notes held in unison bled indeterminately from one tone to another: not music, as I am used to thinking of it, so much as enveloping atmosphere. It created, at any rate, its own climate, not to mention its own world—so much so that I was startled, when I emerged onto the street, to discover that it was still raining in New York.
—April 21, 2009