Telegraph Quartet members Jeremiah Shaw, Eric Chin, Pei-Ling Lin, and Joseph Maille (photograph by Lisa Marie Mazzucco, courtesy of Jensen Artists)
This past Friday Azica Records released its first recording of performances by the Telegraph Quartet. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area with connections to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) as Quartet-in-Residence, the ensemble consists of violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maille (who share first chair), violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. The title of the new album is Divergent Paths, and it is the first in a series entitled 20th Century Vantage Points. The album title refers to the decidedly different directions followed by the two composers represented. The first four tracks present Maurice Ravel’s only string quartet in the key of F major. The remaining tracks account for Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 7, his first “numbered” string quartet in the key of D minor.
By way of disclaimer, I should confess that I was in the audience at SFCM for the first time that Telegraph performed each of these selections at that venue. The first of those recitals took place on December 9, 2017 with a program in which the Schoenberg quartet was preceded by the fifth (in A major) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 18 quartets. The Ravel quartet was then performance at SFCM on April 4, 2018, the earliest composition on a program that showcased Robert Sirota’s third string quartet and John Harbison’s sixth string quartet.
In terms of the “historical time-line,” these two quartets are very close to each other. Ravel completed his quartet in 1903, having begun it the previous year. Similarly, Schoenberg worked on his Opus 7 between 1904 and 1905. However, where listening is concerned, there is a wide gulf between the two compositions. My guess is that almost everyone that goes regularly to chamber music recitals has become familiar with Ravel’s quartet. On the other hand I would be surprised if I could count the number of readers that have encountered the Schoenberg quartet (either in recital or on recording) on one hand. Nevertheless, this was not my first opportunity to experience that quartet in performance, since I had the good fortune to listen to the Kronos Quartet perform it at the University of Southern California when I was living in Los Angeles.
The morning after Telegraph’s Beethoven-Schoenberg program I found myself writing at great length about the Schoenberg portion. This amounted to an exercise in “sense-making through writing;” and, when I go back to read through that article, I have to confess that I had not made very much progress towards making sense of it all. On the other hand, I can appreciate Telegraph’s own approach, which is to liken the score to that of an opera by Richard Wagner. This is not just a matter of extended duration but also an appreciation of thematic material endowed with narrative qualities. To be fair, however, Schoenberg himself wrote that he began work on Opus 7 after having “abandoned program-music.” One might say that, while there may not be an underlying “story,” one can still approach a performance as an “act of narration.”
At the end of the day, my best guide to understanding the nuts and bolts of Opus 7 came from that rather generous booklet that accompanied the Neue Wiener Schule box set of performances by the LaSalle Quartet released by Deutsche Grammophon. In that booklet the background material about Opus 7 was by Schoenberg himself. Sadly, I have no idea whether or not that booklet was included when Deutsche Grammophon reissued this collection in August of 2013. The good news is that the new Telegraph album comes with a booklet of its own, which includes an essay by Kai Christiansen. That essay is much shorter than Schoenberg’s account, but it still lays the basic background for those who approach the quartet as serious listeners.
I suspect that any reader that has made it through all of the above paragraphs may wonder whether or not this is a trip worth taking. When listening to Telegraph’s recital performance of the Schoenberg quartet, I found that the experience was not only worthwhile but downright absorbing. For that matter, the Ravel quartet allowed me to settle in to an appreciation of Telegraph’s expressiveness; and that appreciation continued into the Schoenberg recording. Given that my previous recital encounter with Kronos traversed all four of the Schoenberg quartets, I would hope that Telegraph will extend their appreciation of Schoenberg into the remaining quartets.
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