Sunday, May 2, 2021

Calidore String Quartet’s SHCS Recital

Calidore String Quartet members Jeremy Berry, Estelle Choi, Ryan Meehan, and Jeffrey Myers (from a 2019 announcement announcement of one of their programs)

This afternoon the Baltimore-based Shriver Hall Concert Series (SHCS) concluded its 2021 Virtual Season with a performance by the Calidore String Quartet of violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry, and cellist Estelle Choi. It is worth noting that this ensemble is no stranger to San Francisco, thanks to San Francisco Performances (SFP). They made their SFP debut in Herbst Theatre in January of 2019, performing with pianist Inon Barnatan in a program dedicated entirely to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. On that occasion their primary contribution was to provide “orchestral” accompaniment for four of Bach’s keyboard concertos. The following October the quartet returned to SFP and Herbst, this time playing “real” string quartets by Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven distinguished by final movements based on fugues.

The video for their SHCS performance was pre-recorded at a private home in New York City. It featured the world streaming premiere of a composition by Hannah Lash, which she identifies as her first string quartet. She had actually composed an earlier quartet in 2004 entitled “Four Still;” but she decided to attach a number to this composition consisting of four untitled movements. Her quartet was framed by compositions from either end of the nineteenth century. The program began with Antonin Dvořák’s Opus 96 (“American”) quartet in F major, composed in 1893, and concluded with Franz Schubert’s D. 887 quartet in G major, composed in June of 1826 but not published until 1851, over two decades after the composer’s death.

The Dvořák selection got the program off to an excellent start. All four of the players found just the right comfort zone for the composer’s capacity to interleave his thematic material among all four of the instrumental voices. Furthermore, watching their interpretation of the score, realized through both eye contact and what almost seemed like a vocabulary of gestures, was just as engaging as listening. This was clearly a performance in which the video work enhanced what one might have experienced in a “physical” concert setting.

Sadly, the opening selection on the program was also the most convincing one. Lash clearly understood the capacities of all four of the instruments in the string family, and that understanding allowed her to explore an impressive diversity of sonorities. Nevertheless, there was an emerging sense of one-thing-after-another without much apparent consideration to a sense of how the parts come together to form a whole. There was also the rather surprising decision to have the cellist sing a song during the third movement. Unfortunately, between Choi’s subdued vocal delivery and no apparent concern for having a microphone for her voice, the text that Lash had provided was pretty much entirely incomprehensible.

When the program progressed to the concluding Schubert selection, it became clear that there were more problems with microphone placement than involved Choi’s voice. As a result, it was difficult to know whether significant problems with phrasing the passages in the score were due to a lack of sufficient rehearsal time or simply undue negligence in accounting for the audio capture of the performance. That latter possibility may also have involved situating the performers in a room which lacked adequate space for the technical infrastructure.

To be fair, D. 887 does not get anywhere near as much exposure as Schubert’s D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”) quartet in D minor. The fact is that, from a practical point of view, it is more difficult to negotiate, primarily for rhetorical, rather than technical, reasons. As a result, my most recent encounter with this music in performance dates all the way back to April of 2015, when I was fortunate enough to listen to a killer performance by students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music joined by their coach, Jodi Levitz, playing the viola part.

One reason for any general lack of attention to D. 887 may involve the duration, which is longer than any other Schubert quartet. For that matter, when played with the repeat, the duration of the first movement of D. 887 is longer than the duration of an entire symphony from the time of Joseph Haydn. Being able to command that much duration is no easy matter, and it may be that Calidore needs more than a little more preparation before getting both their mentalities and their dexterity into shape to take on Schubert’s final string quartet.

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