Review: Spokane String Quartet opens season with unconventional, challenging, grand program

Thinking there could be no nicer way to spend two hours on a Sunday afternoon than listening to beautiful and imaginative music, beautifully and imaginatively performed, a sizeable crowd gathered at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox for the opening concert in the 2024-25 season of the Spokane String Quartet. Founded in 1979, the group comprises four prominent members of the Spokane Symphony: first violin Mateusz Wolski, second violin Amanda Howard-Phillips, viola Jeanette Wee-Yang and cello Helen Byrne.

Rather than easing into the season with a conventional program of quartets by Haydn, Mozart and, say, Brahms, the group chose to challenge themselves with a program that in a way deconstructs the assumptions that can get in the way of close and careful listening to music by starting the program with Beethoven’s most enigmatic string quartet (No. 16 in F Opus 135), following it with the strikingly original “Pisachi” (2013) for string quartet by Chikasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate and concluding with Antonin Dvorak’s emotionally elusive Quartet in D minor Opus 34 (1877).

As he moved into what proved to be the final phase of his career, Beethoven followed the example of J.S. Bach by funneling his volcanic creative energy into huge works intended to summarize his mastery of every aspect of his mastery. In addition to the Ninth Symphony Op. 125, the best-known example, he produced two gigantic piano works: the Sonata in B-flat Op. 106 (once considered impossible to play) and the “Diabelli Variations” Op. 120. Finally, the Missa Solemnis in D Op. 123 broke all previous barriers of size, duration and imaginative complexity. One would expect, then, that his final string quartet would be similarly awe-inspiring, but, in fact, it is his shortest, and plainest, and therein lies its true audacity.

In this, Beethoven’s final complete work, he dares himself, and us, to do without many of the techniques and devices that produce such dramatic results in his earlier works: virtuosic instrumental writing, long, gripping spans of musical development, sometimes extending beyond movements to embrace entire compositions, compulsive rhythmic repetition and engaging, heart-melting melody. By contrast, rhythms no sooner get started in the F major quartet than they come to a sudden halt. Likewise, rather than being wittily developed and ornamented, melodic phrases seem to start later, and end sooner than they should.

Revealing the artistic and emotional coherence of a work such as this is a real interpretive challenge, and the Spokane String Quartet met it brilliantly by presenting Beethoven’s visionary succession of ideas with complete poise and naturalness. Wolski tactfully subordinated his commanding personality to Beethoven’s design, in which all four instruments play equally important roles.

The meaning in English of the Chickasaw word “pisachi” is “reveal.” Jerod Tate employs a medium developed by a German composer of the 18th century to reveal cultural, intellectual and spiritual assumptions that are as different as those held by Haydn could possibly be. The sonata form on which most works by European composers of the 18th and 19th centuries is modeled is founded on the assumption of conflict, hence the opposition of themes within and between movements, the alternation between major and minor keys, indeed, the very foundations of harmony throughout most of three centuries. In the Indigenous culture “revealed” in Tate’s work, such categories, divisions and conflicts are unknown. To be sure, the natural world in this view is full of variety, but all this variety harmonizes in a way that has no need for a single tonal center or fixed arrangement of pitches in a scale.

Tate’s work projects this notion of natural harmony to a very remarkable degree by employing a thrilling palate of nontraditional harmonies and novel colors to transmit an experience of the natural world characterized by wholeness and free of hierarchy. Such music requires that the quartet set aside many of standards by which most of what they customarily play is judged: sensuous tone, elegant phrasing, sparkling passagework. Tate’s music, though unconventional, demands precise execution, impeccable intonation and exacting control of tone color, all of which the Spokane String Quartet delivered faultlessly.

It is likely that some in Sunday’s audience, seeing that a quartet by Dvorak concluded the program, expected a return to the comforting cushion of central European romanticism from the emotional ambiguity and ambivalence of the first half of the program. To be sure, Dvorak’s D minor quartet provides melody in abundance, while doing little to challenge any settled notions of harmony or musical form. Even so, the emotional landscape he paints is in many ways as ambiguous and elusive as anything we heard earlier.

Dvorak composed this quartet in a burst of creative activity, during an emotionally complex period of his life. On the one hand, he was deeply saddened by the death of two of his young children, while, on the other, he was buoyed by the approval and mentorship of his musical idol, Johannes Brahms, who recommended this work and others by Dvorak to Brahms’ publisher. Perhaps as a result of these conflicting feelings, Dvorak produced a quartet lyrical and melancholy, in which joy and sorrow are sometimes so blended as to be indistinguishable one from the other. Those in the audience who were familiar with other, more famous works by the composer, such as his Symphony No. 7 in D minor or his magnificent Cello Concerto in B minor, may have expected the clouds to lift in the final movement and triumph to assert itself by a glorious change from minor to major. In fact, no such transformation takes place; the tonality remains in the minor, and the intricate conversation among the players in the quartet remains muted, subdued and allusive.

Music of such subtlety demands performers be willing to let pass opportunities for grand gestures for the sake of laying down the right tints on a broad, complex canvas. In this effort, every voice was essential to the blend asked for by the composer, but the viola of Jeanette Wee-Yang played a crucial role in maintaining the balance between light and dark that is unique to this work. The range of color she can command from her often recalcitrant instrument, and the fluency of her bowing played a large part in the success of this performance.