Calder Quartet Partners with Timo Andres

Calder Quartet members Benjamin Jacobson, Tereza Stanislav, Jonathan Moerschel, and Eric Byers  (photograph by Jesse Holland, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances presented the first of the five programs in its Shenson Chamber Series. Each of these five programs will feature a string quartet, and three of those programs will include a “guest artist.” Last night’s ensemble was the Calder Quartet, whose members are violinists Benjamin Jacobson and Tereza Stanislav, violist Jonathan Moerschel, and cellist Eric Byers, presenting the first of two recitals in the Series. The “guest artist” for the occasion was Timo Andres, appearing as both pianist and composer.

The “core” of the program was prepared with a “call and response” plan. The “call” for the program was the music of Franz Schubert, represented by his D. 804 quartet in A minor, often known as the “Rosamunde” quartet, since the music originally composed for the third entr’acte of Rosamunde (D. 797) resurfaces as the theme of the second (Andante) movement. The “response” was “Remembering Schubert,” a composition for solo piano by Ann Southam, described by Andres as a “Canadian minimalist.” In his own capacity as composer, Andres provided the opening and closing selections of the program. The first of these was his “Machine, Learning” string quartet; and the program concluded with his second piano quintet entitled “The Great Span” and structured as a double chaconne.

This was clearly an acutely conceived program structure. Nevertheless, I felt that the Schubert quartet towered like Lemuel Gulliver over the Lilliputian stature of the other three compositions. After having devoted much of his attention to songs, Schubert began to shift his attention to instrumental chamber music in 1824, and D. 804 was one of the earliest (if not the earliest) mature efforts. There is much to engage the attentive listener, particularly in the techniques for allotting thematic content to all four of the quartet players. Calder clearly had a solid command of this music, and I certainly would not mind having a recording of their approach to interpretation at my disposal.

Apparently Southam’s memories of Schubert never quite registered in her own composition. Indeed, the music seemed to be more than a little bit at sea in establishing its own thematic content and development. (I notice that, while listening to this piece last night, I scribbled “disfigured bass” next to Southam’s entry on the program sheet.) Nevertheless, when compared with the two Andres compositions, her brevity was decidedly welcome.

Andres tends to have a gift for seizing attention with his opening gestures; but, over the course of my listening experiences, I have always come away disappointed that he never seemed to know what to do next. By all rights, the repetitive structure of a chaconne should have served as a solid framework for “The Great Span;” but neither the piano nor the strings ever convincingly oriented themselves around that framework. Even in the brevity of the individual movements of “Machine, Learning,” there was little to guide the attentive listener other than a coy citation of Giacomo Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” aria from his “Gianni Schicchi” one-act opera.

By the time “The Great Span” had completed the overall plan for the program, I felt more than a little like Oliver Twist asking to be served some more Schubert.