SFP Presents Rarely Played Piano Quintet

Doric String Quartet members Alex Redington, Ying Xue, Hélène Clément, and John Myerscough (photograph by George Garnier, courtesy of SFP)

Yesterday the Travel Gods were unhappy, and the consequences for us here in San Francisco involved a foreshortened recital program last night in Herbst Theatre. San Francisco Performances (SFP) had planned the occasion for the debut of Doric String Quartet, based in Great Britain and currently touring the United States. The members of the quartet, violinists Alex Redington and Ying Xue, violist Hélène Clément, and cellist John Myerscough, were joined on their tour by pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. That partnership allowed them to introduce Frank Bridge’s piano quintet in D minor to their American audiences.

Bridge is probably best known as Benjamin Britten’s teacher, yet it is not often that one encounters an opportunity to listen to his music. In that respect I find that I have had more opportunities to listen to his work here in San Francisco than I had for the first 60 years of my life. Only this past April the San Francisco debut of the Kanneh-Mason duo of cellist Sheku and his sister Isata at the piano in Davies Symphony Hall included Bridge’s duo sonata for those instruments.

Thus, while the delay in beginning last night’s program led to the omission of a string quartet by Joseph Haydn (Hoboken III/49, the last of the six Opus 50 compositions, known as the “Prussian” quartets), the Bridge quintet was the high point of the evening. Even the structure of the music was innovative. Bridge reworked the usual four-movement plan into one consisting of three movements. The middle movement then consisted of a scherzo, framed on either side by an Adagio, thus accounting for two movements in a single ABA structure.

More important, however, was the abundance of rich rhetorical stances one encountered throughout all three of the quintet’s movements. This involved some imaginative approaches to the interplay between keyboard and quartet, as well as allowing each of the quartet instruments have is own fair share of attention. The listening experience was enlightening from beginning to end; and I, for one, would be happy if the Doric’s contract with Chandos Records would lead to a recording of a composition that clearly deserves far attention than it has been receiving. (Doric already has a Chandos album of the complete Britten quartets.)

The program began with Doric playing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 95 (“Serioso”) quartet in F minor. This is the last of his so-called “middle” quartets; and the rhetoric is as intense as its name implies. The Doric players were definitely not shy in taking on that intensity. One might even call their performance a blood-and-guts interpretation. Nevertheless, it was clear that all four of the players were tightly coupled among each other, allowing even the slightest gesture of interplay to register as strongly as each of the individual voices. Anyone complaining about hearing too much Beethoven would do well to consider the many virtues of how Doric interpreted this particular quartet score.

Thus, while last night’s performance was shorter than originally planned, there was more than enough to satisfy the needs of any seriously attentive listener.