Forget Elon Musk and his super-fancy cars. He may be making an embarrassing hash of his company at the moment, but he is not the only claimant to the name. There is quite a wonderful group of string players operating under the name of the Tesla Quartet, and I was lucky enough to hear them last night at a BAC Salon.
The Salons (as their progenitor and programmer, Pedja Muzijevic, announced before the concert last night) have been going for thirteen years now, and I have been attending them since practically the beginning. On each occasion, a small number of audience members paying nominally for their tickets arrive at the fourth-floor Howard Gilman Performance Space of the Baryshnikov Arts Center and are treated to something special. It is almost always chamber music, and the performers can vary from the famous to the relatively unknown, but the playing is always at a very high level. In this case, the programming as well was superb, with a strange and fascinating vocal piece by Berio sandwiched between two string quartets: Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 1 from 1917, and Debussy’s sole String Quartet from 1893. What could be nicer than hearing an hour of complicatedly entrancing, beautifully performed music in an intimate setting? Nothing, if you ask me.
The 1966 Berio piece, Sequenza III for solo voice, is exactly the kind of thing that Muzijevic excels at digging up. I would be surprised if any of us in the audience had heard it before—especially since it requires an extraordinarily adept soprano, one who can shriek, gurgle, cackle, mutter, gesture, and declaim as well as sing beautifully. Fortunately Alexandra Smither, the young singer who took on the startlingly dramatic piece, was more than up to the job. I hope someday to see her onstage with Simon Rattle, who loves to employ singers with her diverse talents.
The heart of the evening for me, though, lay in the two performances by the Teslas. I had not heard the Szymanowski live before, and I found it interesting and appealing, if a bit self-consciously odd in places. But since self-consciously odd was, in a way, the theme of the Berio, the first quartet set up the Smither performance perfectly. Still, it was only when we got to the Debussy, which I know much better, that I could appreciate how truly terrific the Teslas were. They were, for one thing, absolutely in sync with each other, able to pause heartstoppingly in unison and then begin the next phrase as if they were a single consciousness rather than four. The four players—Ross Snyder and Michelle Lie on violin, Edwin Kaplan on viola, and Serafim Smigelskiy on cello—were also masters of their respective instruments, something that truly came out in the notoriously difficult pizzicato passages, which in their hands were complex and rapid but also entirely, distinctly audible. It was a huge pleasure to submit myself to this glorious, unnerving piece of music once again, knowing this time that we were bound to arrive safely on the far shore. Only a quartet group as skilled and adventurous as the Teslas is capable of giving you this feeling—that you in the audience are sharing the risks and enchantments of the whole voyage with them, and not simply listening from afar.