New York Philharmonic String Quartet at Herbst

New York Philharmonic String Quartet members Frank Huang, Cynthia Phelps, Carter Brey, and Sheryl Staples (from the Chamber Music San Francisco concerts Web page)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Daniel Levenstein’s Chamber Music San Francisco concert series introduced its audience to the New York Philharmonic (NYP) String Quartet. This group was formed in January of 2017 by four of its Principal musicians. The violinists are Concertmaster Frank Huang and Principal Associate Concertmaster Sheryl Staples, the violist is Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps, and the cellist is Principal Cello Carter Brey. The group made its debut in a performance of John Adams’ “Absolute Jest,” which he scored for full orchestra and string quartet, at NYP subscription concerts in March of 2017.

Here in San Francisco the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) often features solo performances by “its own” over the course of a season of subscription concerts. Also, as regular readers know by now, SFS members regularly group themselves to prepare Sunday afternoon chamber music programs in Davies Symphony Hall; and I try to attend as many of these as my schedule will manage. However, the organization of the musicians is based on repertoire, rather than an initial commitment to form a string quartet or any other form of chamber ensemble. Thus, there is no “fixed group” that can augment its schedule with performance commitments of its own.

The NYP ensemble, on the other hand, was conceived with staying power in mind. That power has endured for over two years and has involved touring visits to cities such as Cincinnati and Palm Beach. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time they have crossed the continent to California; and there was much to appreciate in their first appearance in our city.

Of particular interest was the second half of the program, devoted entirely to the second (in A minor) of the two string quartets that Johannes Brahms published as his Opus 51. This music was published in 1873, the year of his 50th birthday. By that time he had built up an impressively rich catalog of chamber music compositions, none of which were string quartets. Opus 51 was a venture into a territory that was not only new but also intimidating due to the imposing legacies of all three “First Viennese School” composers, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

When SFS musicians played this quartet at the end of last month, it was unclear who was having more trouble negotiating unfamiliar territory, Brahms or his interpreters. Last night’s performance also gave some sense of Brahms trying to find his way. Nevertheless, the NYP players had clearly forged a trail of their own, making for a far more satisfying listening experience.

As any good student of the analytical techniques of Heinrich Schenker will tell you, one cannot present a clear account of a piece of music unless one can distinguish the foreground and background elements in the score. The A minor quartet confronts both performers and listeners with a thickness of texture that one rarely associates with only four instruments. The challenge is to provide the listener with an account in which that thickness is not a morass of background without any foreground.

The NYP players had very clear ideas of where that foreground resided; and, more importantly, they recognized how the foreground itself would peregrinate from one instrument to another. Thus, by the time the exposition for the first movement has concluded, every member of the quartet has had responsibility for presenting foreground while knowing when to recede into the background. As a result, the performance did not so much convey the impression of a mature composer trying out the string quartet genre for the first time as it did one of a skilled master of polyphony in which there was an ongoing flow of transitions between background and foreground.

It was clear that considerable thought had gone into making this A minor quartet not just an absorbing experience but also a compelling one. Sadly, those lightning bolts of inspiration did not strike quite as surely during the first half of the evening. The program opened with Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/76 (“Fifths”) quartet in D major, the second of the six Opus 76 quartets dedicated to the Hungarian count József Erdődy.

There seemed to be uncertainty of intonation in the opening measures, suggesting that the performers had not resolved the best ways to listen to each other up on the Herbst stage. However, while those issues quickly fell into place as the performance progressed, there was still a significant lack in their account of the quartet. While there was no shortage of wit in the score that Haydn had created, very little of that wit emerged in last night’s performance. Every now and then an eye or two might twinkle along with a particular gesture, but there was little to acknowledge the overall spirit of prankishness across the entire quartet.

This was most evident in the Minuetto, which, like most of Haydn’s instances of that genre, defies anyone to dance to that music; but, in this case, he gives the eccentricity an extra kick by structuring the dance as a somewhat clodhopping canon. This turned out to be a curtain-raiser for the quartet’s delightfully raucous Finale. Yet so little of that sense of fun behind the music turned one of Haydn’s most stimulating efforts to a competent, but not particularly absorbing, routine.

The first half of the program then concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 117 (ninth) quartet in E-flat major. This quartet followed the Opus 110 (eighth) quartet in C minor, which is one of the composer’s most intense compositions in this genre. It was written over the course of only three days, July 12–14, 1960. The following year he composed the first version of the ninth quartet and burned the results almost as soon as he had completed them. He would not return to writing a quartet until 1964, finishing the second version (which would then be published) on May 28 of that year.

The piece is in five movements played without pause. The distinctions between the movements, however, are clear, since they all involve significant mood swings. Nevertheless, the NYP players never seemed to convey a sense of overall flow to the structure. Indeed, by the time they had advanced to the final Allegro movement, which is disproportionately longer than any of its predecessors, there was this disconcerting feeling that they were marking time until they reached the final measure. This may not have been a high point in the catalog of Shostakovich quartets, but it left at least this listener feeling as if the music deserved better than it got.