String quartet conveyed confidence
The Spokane String Quartet’s performance at The Met Sunday afternoon combined two ingredients that make any chamber ensemble nervous. First, the concert was a season opener. That alone is enough to add an edge of anxiety to a concert. Also, the quartet was performing with a new member. Jeanette Wee-Yang replaced Nicholas Carper as the ensemble’s violist. But whatever anxieties might have been felt disappeared in a performance that bloomed with confidence and responsiveness.
The quartet – violinist Kelly Farris and Tana Bachman, Wee-Yang, and cellist Helen Byrne – opened the program with a mellow reading of Mozart’s late period Quartet in D major (K. 499). From the finely balanced opening with the four instruments playing in octaves through the work’s numerous paired melodic conversations between pairs of instruments, it was abundantly clear that Wee-Yang was a gifted chamber musician – as fine a listener as she is a player.
The group sounded especially fine in the Adagio movement where the music always gratified the ear’s expectations, but not always in the way you expect. Mozart interrupted violinist Farris’ soaring coloratura melodies with dramatic chords, and the composer had phrases arrive at their endings with Bryne’s cello line taking a surprise turn. Only in the madly dashing scales of the finale did a bit of edginess show through now and then.
The 18th-century equanimity of Mozart was followed by the gritty 20th-century complexity of Bartok’s Quartet No. 3, one of the quartet literature’s greatest challenges. The work is short, but packed with intense emotion ranging from grinding dissonance to sudden appearances of lyrical folklike tunes. Listening to the work in Sunday’s deeply committed performance was something like watching a German expressionist film from the 1920s (the very time when this work was written) with experimental frightening close-ups, weird camera angles and baffling shifts of plot and perspective.
Bartok learned all kinds of unusual sound effects from folk fiddlers in Hungary and Romania – sliding from one pitch to the next, playing notes percussively with the wood of the bow, making the strings squeal by bowing next to the bridge of the instrument. These unconventional demands were met easily by the Spokane Quartet players who made Bartok’s bizarre sonorities sound vividly expressive.
Schumann’s String Quartet No. 3 concluded the program. Schumann doesn’t provide Bartok’s radical vocabulary of sounds, but he creates whole movements built up of short, sometimes abruptly contrasting, sections. The Spokane players managed to give the work a logic and line of continuity without sacrificing Schumann’s startling mood shifts.
In the finale, I was struck by the ease with which the group allowed the music of charging huntsmen suddenly to cut to a courtly gavotte, then back again. How Schumann must have smiled at the thought of what audiences (and players) might have made of such a maneuver.
Sunday’s performance showed that the Spokane String Quartet, with Wee-Yang as its new violist, is an ensemble with the skill and flexibility to range easily from the elegant classicism of Mozart, through the romantic lyricism of Schumann to the outlandish expressionism of Bartok.