Catalyst Quartet Launches New SFP Season

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its 2021–2022 season by, at the same time, launching a new concert series. The series, entitled Uncovered, was organized around four recitals curated and performed by the Catalyst Quartet, a string quartet whose members are violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette, violist Paul Laraia, and cellist Karlos Rodriguez. The series title is also the title of another series, this one of recordings released by Azica records. The title itself refers to the desire to “uncover” works from the African American tradition of chamber music, presenting the work of composers whom history has overlooked due to their race or gender.

This past February this site discussed the release of the first recording in this series, devoted entirely to three compositions by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Two of those pieces were performed last night. The program began with the Opus 5 “Fantasiestücke,” composed in 1896 at the age of 21. (At that young age, Coleridge-Taylor also began work on what may be his most familiar work, his Song of Hiawatha cantata, whose first section was completed in 1898.) The program concluded with the Opus 1 piano quintet in G minor, composed even earlier in 1893. Pianist Stewart Goodyear joined the Catalyst musicians for this performance.

Between these two selections Catalyst played the first string quartet by George Walker, born in 1922, almost a decade after the death of Coleridge-Taylor. This piece was composed in 1946, when Walker was a graduate student at the Curtis Institute of Music. In 1990 the second movement was repurposed for string ensemble under the title “Lyric for Strings.” In that form it received a fair amount of popularity, and in 1996 Walker became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize in music.

Indeed, the “Lyric for Strings” became part of the Catalyst repertoire in its early days following its debut recital in 2010. This prompted a tweet from the composer (computer-literate in his eighties) to the effect that everyone was playing the “Lyric;” but no one was playing the quartet in its entirety. Catalyst took this tweet seriously, and last night marked their first performance of the whole quartet. Sadly, Walker died in 2018. Nevertheless, the presentation was a compelling one; and, hopefully, it will lead to further performances of the entire quartet.

Sadly, the Walker quartet was the only entry in the program book to have its movements enumerated. This was not particularly problematic where Coleridge-Taylor’s Opus 1 was concerned. Indeed, as Coleridge-Taylor’s Wikipedia page cites, the influences of Antonín Dvořák and Johannes Brahms are unmistakeable; so many in the audience could easily followed the quintet’s overall beginning-middle-end architecture. However, Opus 5 was another matter. Each of the five “fantasy pieces” had a title that disclosed both form and rhetoric. Furthermore, since one of the pieces was a minuet with a trio, those trying to count the pieces might have slipped up after that one. Ultimately, Opus 5 is a study of a diversity of moods; and those encountering this music for the first time would have been better equipped to appreciate those moods with the connotations of the movement titles.