Chiaroscuro’s Engaging Account of Mendelssohn

The members of the Chiaroscuro Quartet (Pablo Hernán Benedi, Alina Ibragimova, Emilie Hörnlund, and Claire Thirion) with their instruments (photograph by Agnese Blaubarde, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the Chiaroscuro Quartet made its San Francisco debut. It first violinist, Alina Ibragimova, is no stranger to our city, having given three recitals for San Francisco Performances, making her debut in April of 2012. However, the quartet reaches back earlier in her career, having been formed in 2005. Her colleagues in this endeavor are violinist Pablo Hernán Benedi, violist Emilie Hörnlund, and cellist Claire Thirion. The four of them have been making music as a group for almost two decades, and their debut was decidedly long overdue.

The program they prepared was a straightforward one. The first half was devoted to the two “later” composers of the First Viennese School, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. The second half turned to one of Felix Mendelssohn’s earliest string quartets, his Opus 13 in A minor.

More often than not, Mendelssohn tends to be dismissed for the facile rhetoric of his compositions. On the other hand, Chiaroscuro understands his music with the sort of depth that eschews a glib treatment. Their performance prompted the attentive listener to sit up from the opening Adagio gesture and maintain that attention all the way through the breakneck Presto rhetoric of the final movement. The attention of the listener was guided by the scrupulous awareness exchanged among all four of the performers, all committed to the precept that no detail is insignificant. Mendelssohn definitely deserves more advocates cut from the same cloth as the Chiaroscuro players.

Beethoven was represented by the last of his “middle period” string quartets, Opus 95 in F minor. The minor-key rhetoric is reinforced by the title affixed to the composition, “Serioso.” The overall rhetoric is one of highly expressive intensity. The tempos alternate between Allegro and Allegretto, and the only decidedly slow passage is the Larghetto espressivo introduction to the last of the four movements. This is the foundational rhetoric that guides the attentive listener through the entire composition, and the interplay among the four Chiaroscuro musicians could not have forged better paths to guide that listener. This quartet was written over the course of one month in 1810; and Beethoven would not return to this genre for about fifteen years, when the first of his late quartets, Opus 127, was composed in 1825.

The “overture” for last night’s program was Franz Schubert’s D. 703 in C minor, identified simply as “Quartettsatz.” This provided the perfect introduction to Chiaroscuro’s command of intense rhetoric. Two measures of rapid-fire sixteenth notes are passed from one instrument to another until the entire ensemble is chattering away like an infernal machine, only to climax in a fortissimo chord of eight notes. Once the riveting attention of the listener had been established, the ensemble could get down to an intense approach to thematic development that evolves within a sonata-form framework that decidedly takes Beethoven’s approach to that genre to a higher level.

Taken in its entirety, last night’s program made it clear that, when properly interpreted, there is nothing “old fashioned” about the early nineteenth century.