Quartetto di Cremona Returns to IIC

Yesterday evening the Quartetto di Cremona of violinists Cristiano Gualco and Paolo Andreoli, violist Simone Gramaglia, and cellist Giovanni Scaglione made a return visit to the Italian Cultural Institute (Istituto Italiano di Cultura, IIC). They used their previous recital to present Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 132 string quartet in A minor. This time they continued their pursuit of adventurous compositions for string quartet by moving from Beethoven to Franz Schubert and his D. 810 quartet in D minor, known as “Death and the Maiden,” since the second movement is a set of variations on the D. 531 song Schubert had composed with that title.

This is probably Schubert’s best known quartet, and there are no shortages of opportunities to listen to it either in performance or on recording. For all of that familiarity, however, Quartetto di Cremona brought a freshness to last night’s performance. Much of their impact had to do with a sense of balance that was as well-informed as it was expressive.

With Beethoven as his model, Schubert extended the craft of writing for the quartet in such a way that no instrument was ever playing a secondary role. Quartetto di Cremona could not have given a better account of how Schubert could circulate his thematic material among the four instruments, each endowing its own personal take on that material rather than serving any need for echo or affirmation. The result was an account through which even the most jaded listener could appreciate the thoughtfulness through which the whole emerged as far more than the sum of its parts.

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By way of an overture, Quartetto di Cremona began with three relatively short pieces by Lorenzo Ferrero from his Tempi di Quartetto collection. The entire collection consists of twelve pieces divided evenly into two “series.” Quartetto di Cremona recorded all of them on the Klanglogo label for an album released in September of 2015. Last night’s selections came from the second series, “To David Huntley in memoriam,” “Allegro,” and “Slow rock.” The dedicatee of the first of those pieces was an editor for Boosey & Hawkes, who, for all of that publisher’s commitment to twentieth-century modernism, could never shake his love for traditional tonality. The other pieces shared the retrospective qualities of the first with each of the three exploring its own unique genre. Had this been a culinary occasion, these three selections would have constituted the perfect amuse-bouche for the “main course” that would follow.

In the spirit of that metaphor, the evening concluded with a “dessert course” in the form of an encore. Complementing the “overture,” Quartetto di Cremona again turned to an Italian composer, this time the more familiar Giacomo Puccini. The selection was his “Crisantemi” (chrysanthemums), one of his few compositions for string quartet. The music was conceived as a threnody memorializing Puccini’s friend Amadeo I of Spain, better known as the Duke of Aosta than for his brief reign as King of Spain. Through Quartetto di Cremona’s account, one could certainly appreciate Puccini’s expressiveness as much as one could recognize that chamber music was not his strong suit. (Thematic material from “Crisantemi” would later find its way into the score for the opera Manon Lescaut.)