Aris Quartet members Anna Katharina Wildermuth, Noémi Zipperling, Caspar Vinzens, and Lukas Sieber (photograph by Sophie Wolter, from the ensemble’s Web site)
Last night in Herbst Theatre Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) launched its 2023 season with a debut performance by the Aris Quartet. The members are violinists Anna Katharina Wildermuth and Noémi Zipperling, violist Caspar Vinzens, and cellist Lukas Sieber. They first came together in 2009 when they were students at the University of Music in Frankfurt, and they have performed as an ensemble ever since then. Last night’s performance was part of their first visit to the United States. Only cellist Sieber is seated during a performance, while the other three quartet members play while standing.
Ironically, last night’s program provided regular concert-goers with an opportunity to compare one of the selections with its performance by Quatour Van Kuijk on the previous evening. That ensemble began the program with Felix Mendelssohn’s final string quartet in F minor, published posthumously as his Opus 80. Last night that quartet was the second work on the program to be performed.
While the Van Kuijk ensemble used this selection to make sure that the audience was attentive at the very beginning of the evening, the Aris Quartet was confident enough to believe that they had already established audience attention with their performance of the opening selection, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 465 (“Dissonance”) quartet in C major. The dissonance of the opening measures definitely seizes audience attention; but, once C major is definitely established, K. 465 emerges as one of Mozart’s sunniest quartets. Having found the audience’s “comfort zone,” the Aris players turned to Mendelssohn to revive the disquiet of Mozart’s first minutes of performance.
My own impression was that Aris took a “deeper dive” into the darkness that Mendelssohn evoked through his minor-key writing. As a result, listening was not just a matter of attention but also one of exploring the many dark corners of a domain that was clearly ruled by the Shadow of Death. Indeed, the quartet can be approached in terms of the composer’s reaction to the recent death of his sister, if not to the more personal sense that his own relatively young body did not have much longer to live.
In many respects Mendelssohn’s Opus 80 couples well with K. 465, since Mozart’s life was also shorter than one might have wished. However, where Opus 80 is driven by its sinister qualities, the darkness at the opening of K. 465 is so brief that one has pretty much forgotten it by the time the first movement has concluded. More important were the sparkling qualities of Mozart’s C major rhetoric that Aris mined from the marks on paper, thus making the opening offering for their first visit to San Francisco an experience that would win over the hearts of their audience. The reception they received at the conclusion of K. 465 made it clear that they had made their case.
Having explored the extremes of two relatively well-known quartets, Aris followed the intermission with a venture into a less familiar domain. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Edvard Grieg’s Opus 27 quartet in G minor. We tend to associate Grieg primarily with solo piano music and orchestral works, the latter often composed as incidental music for dramatic performances. If his chamber music selections are few, Grieg’s Opus 27 invoked a rhetorical landscape that differed significantly from those of both Mozart and Mendelssohn. This allowed Aris to present an entirely new toolbox of expressiveness, leaving at least this listener to wonder why this music is performed so seldom.
The encore selection also involved music that is seldom encountered. However, those that have been following both this site and Examiner.com for some time will probably be more familiar with the choice that Aris made. The offering was “Nature Lies Peaceful in Slumber and Dreaming,” the eleventh of the twelve short pieces that Antonín Dvořák collected under the title Cypresses. These were originally composed as a song cycle, but Dvořák rearranged them for string quartet. Back in the days of the Cypress String Quartet, that ensemble would often draw upon movements from Cypresses for their encore selections; and they recorded the string quartet version in its entirety. As a result, the Aris musicians left (at least) this listener reflecting on many past encounters with the string quartet repertoire that still have vivid memories.
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