Friday, November 12, 2021

Catalyst Quartet Continues Uncovered Series

Last night in Herbst Theatre, the Catalyst Quartet of violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette, violist Paul Laraia, and cellist Karlos Rodriguez performed the second of the four recitals in its Uncovered series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). That title is also the title of a series of albums that Catalyst has begun to record for Azica Records. The title reflects the quartet’s desired to “uncover” artists in classical music that have been overlooked, especially because of race or gender.

The first Azica release was devoted entirely to the music of London-born Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The first Uncovered recital featured two of the three compositions on that album:  the Opus 5 “Fantasiestücke,” composed in 1896 at the age of 21 and the earlier Opus 1 piano quintet in G minor, composed in 1893. Pianist Stewart Goodyear joined Catalyst as guest artist.

Last night’s program completed Catalyst’s survey of Coleridge-Taylor on Azica with the remaining selection from their album. This was the Opus 10 clarinet quintet in F-sharp minor, performed with guest artist Anthony McGill on clarinet. (Both Goodyear and McGill performed on the Azica album.) This music was composed in 1906, a decade later than Opus 10.

It is a bit hard to listen to this quintet without thinking of Johannes Brahms Opus 115 quintet in B minor. Both are in a minor key, which evokes a variety of emotions of introspection. It would not surprise me to learn that the Brahms quintet inspired Coleridge-Taylor to undertake his Opus 10. Nevertheless, if there are “reflections” of Brahms in Coleridge-Taylor’s score, they are the reflections of the many facets of a finely-cut gem. Furthermore, while the Brahms quintet is dominated by introspective quietude, Coleridge-Taylor’s rhetoric is distinctively more energetic. This is readily apparent to the attentive listener, even though the SFP program lacked the tempo markings for the four movements of the Coleridge-Taylor quintet!

The quintet concluded the program, which began with the first string quartet by a composer that was born two decades after Coleridge-Taylor’s death and was named after him: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Perkinson died in 2004, and remarks from the stage included first-person recollections of the man and his works. The quartet was composed in 1956 and given the name “Calvary” due to the influence of the spiritual with that title. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of spirituals is kept under wraps, allowing the composer to transform a familiar theme into his own full palette of melodic resources.

The spiritual was then given a more explicit treatment as the first source for Florence Price’s Five Folksongs in Counterpoint. This music enjoyed a generous number of streamed performances when pandemic conditions were at their most serious. I seem to be able to account for three of those performances involving, respectively,  San Francisco’s Thalea String Quartet, members of the San Francisco Symphony string section, and the Jupiter String Quartet performing for the Bowdoin International Music Festival.

Nevertheless, there is no substitute for being in the presence of the performers. Price’s counterpoint is prodigiously rich without being so thick as to be obscure. Indeed, the counterpoint can be so lush that it almost seems as if Price knew she was overdoing her treatment of tunes that were intentionally simple. Rae Linda Brown’s Price biography, The Heart of a Woman, never says anything about the composer having a prankish side. However, beneath the thick Web of four voices in richly-elaborated counterpoint there is an unabashedly cheerful undercurrent, and Catalyst found just the right way to disclose all the sunshine in that rhetoric.

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