Last night the Elias String Quartet (violinists Sara Bitlloch and Donald Grant, violist Simone van der Giessen, and cellist Marie Bitlloch) returned to Herbst Theatre to make its third appearance at a San Francisco Performances (SFP) concert. The quartet used the occasion to revisit music that it had performed when it made its SFP debut in March of 2013. On that occasion, participating in Jonathan Biss’ Schumann: Under the Influence project, the group played Robert Schumann’s A minor string quartet, the first of the three published as Opus 41, the only string quartets he composed.
In 2013 the group’s venture into this rarely played quartet did not fare very well, almost as if the players had not yet figured out how to approach the composition and did not have very many (if any) models upon which to draw. Six years later they have clearly mustered far more confidence and a keener sense of the intricate structures of the individual movements and the overall plan of the entire composition. They also have a new violist, who seems to have added richness to the low-register string sonorities, sonorities that seem to have had a particular appeal to Schumann. By leading off the recital with this piece, the ensemble quickly established a rhetoric of informed confidence that has now identified it as a significant representative of this rarely-encountered music.
Furthermore, the first half of the program was organized as a “call and response,” with Sally Beamish’s fourth string quartet serving as a “response” to the “call” of the Schumann quartet, written on a joint commission from Wigmore Hall in London and the Harvard Musical Association. Beamish gave her quartet the subtitle “Nine Fragments,” which conveniently describes its structure. Each of these nine short movements provides a reflection on what Beamish took to be a key element of the Schumann quartet. She then deployed her fragments in the reverse order of their appearance in Schumann’s score. In other words that concept of reflection has been deliberately endowed with a double meaning!
All this promised to be an engaging listening experience, particularly since Elias had done such an excellent job of reviving memories of my past encounter with Schumann’s quartet. Second violinist Grant even delivered an oral introduction, which proved to be a useful extension to the written text that Beamish had provided for the program book. Unfortunately, Beamish talked a far better game than she could bring to the printed pages servings as parts for the Elias players. While Grant’s remarks provided a far better leg up than Beamish’s own words, I still felt I had lapsed back to my days as an academic, forced to listen to a student defending the worthiness of the ideas behind his Master’s Thesis. Looking back on my remarks about Beamish’s “Seavaigers,” which the New Century Chamber Orchestra played this past November with Anthony Marwood as Guest Conductor, I realized that this was not the first time I had encountered her difficulties in translating interesting ideas into rhetorically viable music.
Fortunately, the second half of the program was devoted to a British composer with a far more secure command of both technical and rhetorical skills, the late Benjamin Britten. Elias played his Opus 36 (second) quartet in C major. I should make clear that I have become particularly attached to this quartet as a result of Friction Quartet having included it on their debut album, which was released a little less than a year ago. However, that attachment was reinforced because it was composed in the same year as Britten’s Opus 33 opera Peter Grimes; and the quartet is endowed with as vivid a sense of human personality as the opera is. Indeed, it is not hard to think of a “family resemblance” between the intense drama behind the passacaglia that serves as an interlude in Opus 33 and the chaconne structure of the final movement of Opus 36.
Whether or not the Elias players picked up on this connection, they certainly knew how to endow Opus 36 with the same richness of rhetoric that one encounters in Britten’s “narrative” compositions. Those familiar with the composer will easily encounter idioms from sources other than Opus 33; but what matters most is the confident sense of “narration” through which his music ideas unfold and are assigned to different combinations of instrumental voices. It is through all of that diversity that the forceful unison rhetoric that begins the chaconne establishes its own characteristic intensity. This could not have been a better-informed account of Britten; and I, for one, would be happy to see Elias venture into his other compositions for string quartet.
The encore selection seems to have turned to a folk source, which may well have been a hybrid of British and American influences. Having played second violin throughout the recital program, Grant took the lead for this encore; and I was glad to have a vantage point to confirm that the group was not playing from pages of notation. True to the likely origins of the music, this involved in-the-moment music-making based primarily on everyone being sensitive enough to listen to everyone else. The attentiveness of that performance was almost enough to offset the syrupy qualities that would have been more at home in a Ken Burns soundtrack; but, in spite of that rhetorical coloring, there is was still much to appreciate in the spontaneity of the execution.
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