AFCM homepageThursday, 26 February 1998
The Brentano String Quartet performed an Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert last night in the the Tucson Convention Center Leo Rich Theatre.
By Ken Keuffel Jr.
The Arizona Daily Star
On the surface, at least, last night's concert by the Brentano String Quartet followed an all-too-familiar pattern:
Begin with a little Haydn, stuff the sandwich with Bartók and end it all with a Beethoven bang. How many times have we encountered this sort of thing?
Not enough. And the Brentano, a hot young string quartet, kept showing us why.
(The Naumburg Award-winning Brentano, incidentally, was founded in 1992. It's named after Antonia Brentano, whom Maynard Solomon and other Beethoven scholars now believe was the composer's mysterious epistolary ``Immortal Beloved.'')
For starters, that B-flat Haydn quartet turned out to be the first of three less popular Opus 71 quartets written for Anton Georg Apponyi, a Hungarian count and a friend of the Esterhazys, Haydn's principal employer. (There are six Apponyi quartets altogether; the more popular ones belong to Opus 74.)
Bartók's String Quartet No. 3 will always seem a little baffling. But Mark Steinberg, the quartet's first violinist, made it more accessible: he introduced the Hungarian's shortest and most concentrated string quartet with humorous, useful remarks.
Specifically, Steinberg set the work in the context of Bartók's work as a collector of folk music. And he even demonstrated some of the work's sound effects; there's a goodly amount of col legno (hitting the string with the wood of the bow) and ponticello (bowing near the bridge).
By the time the evening's concluding work, Beethoven's E-Minor Quartet (op. 59, no. 2), rolled around, you felt all the more inspired to take in that masterpiece once again.
The Beethoven got off to a tentative beginning. For example, those two brutish chords at the beginning of the piece lacked a unanimity of attack.
But soon enough, the Brentano players got on track: each embroidered the third movement's famous Russian theme with exciting fleeting licks. And the solos over cellist Michael Kannen's basement ostinatos in the second adagio have seldom sounded so sublime.
The Brentano's committed reading of the Haydn argued for far more readings.
For starters, the second adagio movement contains a wonderfully lyrical siciliano, a pastoral dance in 6/8 time. The Brentano's reading conjured up images of dancers blissfully swaying in perpetual slow motion. Steinberg's extended lyrical solo graced the proceedings as well.
In the hair-raising vivace finale, Steinberg and the others - violinist Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory and Kannen - rose admirably to the rapid, virtuoso writing. The performance epitomized how imitative writing should realize itself in performance.
Here, too, the musicians illuminated the hints of Beethoven rage that had begun creeping into Papa Haydn's writing.
In the Bartók, you begin to think that the old idea of striking a balance between repetition and variation is finally at risk. One idea moves quickly to the next; it's as if the composer had hours of good points to make but only 15 minutes to make them.
The Brentano shifted gears with ease, approaching each new piece of material with the same unbridled enthusiasm. The playing was eerie where it had to be, bold where appropriate - and always unfailingly precise.
Now you hear it, now you don't, never sounded so good.