Last night the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) presented its second live-streamed performance in its Fall 2020 concert series. Like the first offering, this was a Faculty Artist Series program featuring the Telegraph Quartet, which is the SFCM quartet-in-residence. The members of this ensemble are Eric Chin and Joseph Maile sharing the first violin chair and joined by violist Pei-Ling Lin and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. Chin, Maile, and Lin are all SFCM alumni currently serving on the faculty. Maile took the first chair for the opening and closing selections, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 34 (third) quartet and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 131 quartet in C-sharp minor, respectively. Chin led the performance of Eleanor Alberga’s second quartet.
The video was streamed through the Vimeo platform. As of this writing, it appears that the Web page for the stream now hosts the recording of the performance. Unfortunately, a bit of editing would have been in order. It appears that the performance itself does not begin until about fourteen minutes into the video.
The Beethoven selection amounted to the first celebration of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth for the new season. (The birthday will not take place until December.) Opus 131 is a major undertaking, and it filled the second half of the program. Its overall structural plan is as highly inventive as it is uneven. The work consists of seven movements played without interruption, the shortest of which (the third) is less that a minute in duration, followed by the longest, about fifteen minutes long, consisting of a set of variations on a theme. In addition, the very opening movement is a fugue with a sinuously chromatic subject, meaning that the key of C-sharp minor is not established particularly firmly until the very last movement.
Such a description is likely to leave the impression that Opus 131 is an unwieldy beast that can only be tamed by the most experienced of ensembles. While Telegraph was formed less than a decade ago (in 2013), they played the music as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Ambiguities in both thematic and harmonic content gave way to the profuse diversity of interplay among different members of the group. Indeed, one even finds Beethoven reflecting back on the many witty turns of his early compositions. His sense of humor is very much still with him in Opus 131, particularly in the variations; and, while the Telegraph players tended towards deadpan demeanor (abetted to some extent by the masks they wore), it was clear they knew how to deliver Beethoven’s jokes without overplaying them.
Korngold’s Opus 34 seems to have been composed in 1945 in reaction to the end of World War II. Indeed, around the same time Korngold also composed his Opus 35 violin concerto. Championed (and recorded) by Jascha Heifetz, Korngold’s music fell out of favor when the pendulum swung in favor of atonal serial techniques. Fortunately, there has been a recent revival of interest in the concerto; and it was good to experience Telegraph according the same respect to Opus 34. It may be worth noting that, while Korngold seemed to enjoy seeding Opus 35 with several references to his film scores, Opus 34 is given a somewhat more “formal” treatment. However, even without any hints of familiarity, Telegraph gave an engaging account of the quartet’s four movements.
Alberga’s quartet has a single-movement structure. Much of its rhetoric is rhythmically energetic, so it should be no surprise that one of her major influences was Béla Bartók. Indeed, when we realize that much of Bartók’s energetic rhetoric can be traced back to Hungarian folk sources, it is possible that Alberga’s approach to that same rhetoric may well have reflected her Jamaican origins. Nevertheless, as is frequently the case with Bartók, her second quartet has a keen sense of abstract structure, leading the attentive listener through a series of episodes that unfold over the course of about fifteen minutes. This is definitely one of those “first encounter” pieces that deserves more listening opportunities.
Technically, the streaming experience was far more satisfying than the one for “opening night.” Most important was that audio quality was consistently improved, not only for the quartet performances but also for the introductory remarks provided by Maile and Chin. There was also “special intermission content.” Most informative was a “cyberspace conversation” between Chin and Alberga, which offered key insights through both the questions posed and the answers they prompted. (Some of those insights may have had greater impact had they been disclosed prior to the performance of Alberga’s quartet, rather than during the following intermission.) Less impressive was an extended profile of Telegraph, which went on far too long leaving at least this viewer itching with impatience for more music!
It is also worth noting that camera direction still needs some refinement. The good news was that there was an impressive diversity of shot angles. The bad news was that the angles alternated rather arbitrarily, sometimes at a dizzying pace; and, as a result, the camera was seldom pointed at the performer(s) most evident to the ear. When he directed videos of performances of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Jordan Whitelaw was known to have said “If you don’t see it, you may not hear it!” Whitelaw was so sensitive to this precept that much of his video direction was guided by his personal capacity for first-rate score reading. There are lessons to be learned from his methodology!
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