Readers may recall that, for this past November, San Francisco Performances (SFP) scheduled a pair of back-to-back recitals, the first being a solo piano recital by Stephen Hough followed by the return of the Castilian String Quartet. Both of these had to be rescheduled, resulting in a single shared program. That revised version was performed last night, and the result was sadly disappointing.
In the second half of the program, Hough joined the quartet for a performance of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 34 piano quintet in F minor. His other “presence” took place in the first half with the Castilian playing his first string quartet, given the programmatic subtitle “Les Six Rencontres.” The program began with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/35, the fifth of the six Opus 20 quartets.
All of this looked pretty good on paper. Listening was another matter. It is worth noting, to be fair, that Natalie Loughran served as substitute viola while Ruth Gibson was on maternity leave. However, the rest of the ensemble (violinists Sini Simonen and Daniel Roberts and cellist Stefan Morris) was intact. Unfortunately, Simonen had major intonation problems at the very beginning of the performance; and things did not improve very much as the four Haydn movements were traversed. This included the swapping of the second (Menuet) and third (Adagio) movements (with no explanation in the program notes by Eric Bromberger, which were probably written for a previous SFP program). For that matter, since I am less familiar with the Haydn canon than I am with the string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, I have to confess that I am not sure if all four of the movements performed were part of the same quartet! All I know for sure is that the final movement is supposed to be a fugue on two subjects.
Hough’s quartet could be followed with less perplexity. For one thing, he provided his own program notes, which made for useful reading. Each of the movements was given the French name of a venue in a city (which could easily be Paris). Taken as a whole, this amounts to a stroll through diverse settings, rather in the spirit of the gallery visited in Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition suite. While the concept was a good one, Mussorgsky had a much better sense of enough-is-enough than Hough had; and each of the latter’s six movements tended of overstay its welcome.
Regular readers probably know by now that the Brahms quintet was given a dynamite account by the Esmé Quartet this past Sunday in Herbst Theatre, the same venue as last night. Sadly, last night’s account never came close to the compelling expressiveness and attention to detail experienced on Sunday. Hough’s face was constantly buried in his tablet, almost entirely as if he was unaware of his four colleagues; and, sadly, those colleagues tended to fumble their way through the intricacies of Brahms’ counterpoint.
Taken as a whole, this was one of those unfortunate one-damned-thing-after-another occasions. If that were not enough, the bottom of the program sheet identified the piano was identified as a “Yamaha CFX 9’ Concert Grand Piano.” Anyone that got close enough to look at the instrument would have had no trouble seeing the “Steinway & Sons” logo. Apparently, a lot of horoscopes were way out of joint last night!
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