Brooklyn Rider Launches New SFP Season

Yesterday evening saw the launch of the new San Francisco Performances season with the first performance in the Chamber Series. The program was presented by the Brooklyn Rider string quartet, whose performers remain violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Michael Nicolas. This was their fourth appearance, the most recent having taking place in March of 2022.

Count Andreas Razumovsky, who commissioned Beethoven’s Opus 59 string quartets (painting by Johann Baptist von Lampi the Younger, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The program was framed by two of the composers in the First Viennese School, beginning with Joseph Haydn and concluding with Ludwig van Beethoven. The opening selection was Haydn’s Hoboken III:35, the fifth of the six Opus 20 compositions known as the Sun Quartets. The program concluded in Beethoven’s middle period with the last of the three Opus 59 quartets dedicated to Count Andreas Razumovsky.

The Haydn quartet was in the key of F minor, always an adventurous mode for the composer. The structures of the middle movements, Menuet and Adagio, were particularly elaborate. That said, there is also much to engage the attentive listener in all of the Razumovsky quartets, and this particular selection served up a more than generous supply of engaging twists and turns.

All of the other composers between these “bookends” were American. They were, in order of appearance, Don Byron (third string quartet), Angélica Negrón (“Our Children Speak Spanish and English”), Ted Hearne (“We are Working Tirelessly for a Ceasefire”), and Bob Dylan, whose “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was arranged for the quartet by Jacobsen. Sadly, the last of those offerings was also the most disappointing, even with Jacobsen and Nicolas singing the words, leading me to wonder if the new generation finds Dylan passé (if they listen to him at all).

Negrón’s composition was augmented with pre-recorded electronics. I could appreciate her good intentions. Nevertheless, I was never really drawn into the performance, reminding me of the down-side of a road “paved with good intentions!” Hearne’s “political” approach was, for me at least, more convincing. His driving rhythms clearly accounted for the “tirelessly” in his title, and the overall diversity of his sonorities was prodigious. However, what really “sealed the deal” was the way in which he deployed driving rhythms leading up to what was clearly a coda for the dead.

In that context, Byron’s quartet was a lighter introduction for what would follow. The first of the three movements may well have been inspired by Loony Toons cartoons. The second movement was the only one with a title: “Russian March.” This was clearly playful, since the music was all pizzicato and the rhythms were ankle-twisting! The final movement reminded me of Lalo Schifrin, who had released two albums leading his “Demented Ensemble.”

Taken as a whole, the evening was sometimes uneven; but the performers had a consistently solid command of the wide diversity of the offerings.