Not T. S. Eliot’s, but real string-playing musicians.
Over the course of less than a month, I recently had the opportunity to hear four first-class quartet groups who were visiting the Bay Area. The string quartet is a strange beast: some have described it as an octopus with eight arms, a single unit melded together through practice. I have a more complicated sense about what makes for an excellent string quartet—it involves cohesion but also individuality, long hours of practice but also inherent sensibility, and even the best quartet group does not play all items of the repertoire equally well. But I was lucky enough, in February and early March, to hear four of my favorite quartets, one after another.
If I have to choose a favorite among favorites, it will always be the Pacifica Quartet—not only because I have been following them with so much affection for so many years, but also because they continually surprise me. On February 12 I went to their concert at San Francisco Performances thinking I would essentially get a rerun of a concert I had heard eighteen months earlier at Alice Tully Hall. That would have been fine; I loved the earlier concert. But to my delight, what I got was something altogether new—not only because a Mozart quartet had been substituted for the initial Haydn, and the closing Mendelssohn quartet switched out for a different Mendelssohn quartet, but because the sole repeated piece, Shulamit Ran’s recent Quartet No. 3 (titled “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory”), seemed like something other than what it had originally seemed. There were the recognizable moments—all four players stamping their feet vehemently at once, second violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson quietly whistling, the jagged clacks of non-musical sounds occasionally emitted by the four instruments—but what finally emerged from these skillful, mutually attuned, always inventive players was a sense that the music was being created on the spot. The Pacificas can do this, incidentally, as easily with Beethoven as they can with a contemporary composer; I have heard them do it many times. But it is still a novel pleasure to see that all live music remains truly live in their hands, however young or old it may be.
Next up in my tour of great string quartets was the venerable Takacs Quartet, performing on February 21 under the auspices of Cal Performances. Two of these players—the second violin and the cellist—are still the original Hungarians who formed the group; the first violin is a highly accomplished Englishman; and the violist is a much-loved former Bay Area player, Geraldine Walther. I don’t feel the personal connection with these guys that I do with the Pacificas, but I certainly take every opportunity to hear them, especially when they are performing Central European pieces. This time, though, the program went from Haydn to Timo Andres to Brahms (not unlike the Pacificas’ sandwich, with the contemporary piece as filling), and though every individual item was good, none was overwhelmingly great. It wasn’t until they played the encore—a snippet of one of Beethoven’s Razumovsky quartets, as a foretaste of what we will get when they do the full Beethoven cycle next year—that the concert really came alive for me. It’s hard to define what makes the difference in such cases: the coherence and vitality with which they play? my own affection for the material? theirs? Whatever it was, it was there in the Beethoven, in full force, reminding me of why it’s always worth coming out for this group.
The third quartet in my series was also courtesy of Cal Performances: the Danish String Quartet, a group of four young men who began playing on these shores only a few years back. (I first heard them at Music@Menlo, which is where I believe their American career started.) If the Takacs performance had felt ever-so-slightly routine, this February 28 concert was just the opposite: an incredibly exciting afternoon of music to which the audience responded as if they had been injected with caffeine. From the 1952 Danish piece (previously unknown to virtually all of us) with which they opened the program, to the Janacek “Kreutzer” quartet, and finally to Beethoven’s magnificent Op. 131, the whole program moved forward with an intensity I have rarely felt in a concert hall. Part of this was due to the friendly manner of the players themselves, each of whom spoke to us in turn about the pieces we were going to hear. But a great deal of it had to do with the power with which they played: the unmitigated verve alternating with the necessary restraint, the sense of deep feeling generated and deep feeling contained, above all (especially in the Beethoven) the huge range of sensations and emotions that they managed to touch upon in the course of a single long sweep. It was one of those occasions when composer melded with performers to produce perfection—and when, after the Beethoven, they played a small Danish chorale as the encore, that too was perfect, because it let us down gently and released us to go home.
My fourth quartet concert, late at night on March 4, consisted of the JACK Quartet playing Georg Friedrich Haas’s Quartet No. 3, which is always done in complete darkness. Again, this was a program put on by San Francisco Performances, but instead of taking place in the staid (if lovely) environs of Herbst Theater, it was put on in the new space at the Strand Theater on Market Street. I have heard the JACK play this piece before and even written about it with great admiration, but I have to say that on this occasion what struck me more than the music itself was the experience of getting to and being at the concert. That stretch of Market Street at night is like something out of Ahmedabad or Mumbai: a scary, continually-under-construction region populated by the hungry homeless, strewn across the sidewalks in unbelievable numbers, while meanwhile, half a block away, nouveau millionaires dine in exotic splendor in the huge variety of restaurants that have popped up to serve them. The Strand itself is a hip new location, and the audience to the sold-out event seemed excessively aware of its privilege in being there: not ideal circumstances for sinking contemplatively into dark music. I also felt that the acoustics were noticeably worse than the first time I heard this strange, sometimes evocative piece (which was at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York), and I deeply missed the sense of discovery that the previous occasion had afforded me. Perhaps certain pieces of new music just don’t remain fresh enough to provide new excitements. Or perhaps the Market Street experience had dampened my senses, forcing me to shut down the receptive tentacles necessary for taking in something novel. I can’t say. But I won’t hold it against the JACK, whom I will eagerly revisit at the very next opportunity, since I know they are likely to have something new and good in store for me.