This afternoon’s recital in the Chamber Music Series at Davies Symphony Hall offered one wind quintet and two string quartets performed by members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Of the two quartets, one used conventional instrumentation, while the other substituted two cellos for two violins. Ironically, this less conventional quartet was the one selection from the nineteenth century. It was the only composition on the second half of the program, while the two works on the first half came from the twentieth century.
To be fair, however, that concluding piece, Anton Arensky’s Opus 35 quartet in A minor, was composed late in the nineteenth century, in 1894 as a memorial for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who had died in 1893. The result is a score rich with influences, beginning with an opening motif, which reappears throughout the quartet, that suggests (if not quotes outright) Russian liturgical choral music. (This is probably the motivating force behind scoring the quartet for violin, viola, and two cellos, thus reinforcing the lower voices of the overall texture.) The second movement is a set of eight variations on a children’s song Tchaikovsky had composed, sometimes translated as “When Jesus Christ was but a child.” The final movement then develops a fugue around the same Russian folk song invoked by Ludwig van Beethoven in his Opus 59, Number 2 string quartet in E minor and again by Modest Mussorgsky in the coronation scene of his Boris Godunov opera.
All these influences amount to an engaging, if not particularly imaginative, pastiche, whose strength resides more in convincing execution than in the sophistication of the score itself. Such execution was provided by violinist David Chernyavsky (who may well have made the decision to perform the quartet), violist Katie Kadarauch, and cellists Amos Yang and Sébastien Gingras. They delivered an interpretation that took Arensky’s memorial spirit at face-value sincerity and with a particular sensitivity to the unique sonorities of its lower-register emphasis.
The opening quartet, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 108 in F-sharp minor provided far more food for thought. When the Borodin Quartet performed this piece almost exactly a year ago for Chamber Music San Francisco, they coupled it with its immediate successor in the string quartet canon, Opus 110 in C minor. Both of these quartets have minor-key darkness; but, while the latter is almost epic in scale (and was subsequently transcribed by Rudolf Barshai for string orchestra with the composer’s approval), Opus 108 is almost a tinder-box of nervous energy. Its gestures tend to be brief, but they suggest a short fuse on a stick of dynamite that detonates in the Allegro finale. That finale, however, is followed by a coda return to those opening gestures, suggesting that another fuse is about to be lit. This quartet was performed with all the necessary connotations of intensity by violinists Florin Parvulescu and Sharon Grebanier, violist Yun Jie Liu, and cellist Michael Grebanier.
The lightest work on the program was also the most recent, a wind quintet composed by John Harbison in 1979. This is structured as a suite of “characteristic” movements: Intrada, Intermezzo, Romanza, Scherzo, and Finale. However, as is the case in Paul Hindemith’s 1922 piano suite, the structural forms of these movements are about the only conventional elements. Harbison uses the different sonorities of the wind quintet instruments to devise some astonishing unison passages through subtle changes in instrumentation. He plays these almost-too-simple unison lines off of wild excursions into dissonance across the five instruments. The result is a roller-coaster ride through unexpected twists of both harmonic and contrapuntal grammar, all deftly executed by flutist Tim Day, oboes William Bennett, clarinetist Carey Bell, bassoonist Stephen Paulson, and Robert Ward on horn.
While there may not have been any logical plan integrating the three works on this program, the diversity of approaches to sonority, rhetorical gestures, and nuts-and-bolts harmony and counterpoint technique resulted in a fascinating journey for the overall experience.
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