Esmé Quartet: Another “Three Centuries” Program

Esmé Quartet players Yuna Ha, Dimitri Murrath, Yeeun Heo, and Wonhee Bae (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

The Esmé Quartet made its debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP) in February of 2022, when it presented the second gift concert for the season. It was formed in 2016 by four Korean musicians studying at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (in Cologne, Germany); and the members were Wonhee Bae (first violin), Yuna Ha (second violin), Jiwon Kim (viola), and Yeeun Heo (cello). Since that time Kim has left the ensemble and has been replaced by violist Dimitri Murrath, currently on the Faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM); and the quartet currently has a residency at SFCM.

As was the case in 2022, the quartet prepared a “three centuries” program. This time the opening eighteenth-century selection was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 575 quartet in D major (complementing the G major quartet that began the first program). Again the second half of the program was devoted to the nineteenth century, this time Franz Schubert’s D. 887 (final) string quartet in G major. The intermission was preceded by the twentieth-century selection, György Ligeti’s first string quartet, given the title “Métamorphoses Nocturnes.” Ironically, I have SFP to thank for my last (and probably first) encounter with this quartet, when I heard it performed by the Castalian Quartet in November of 2021.

On that occasion, I suggested that Ligeti’s quartet “could almost be taken for Béla Bartók’s seventh string quartet.” It was a relatively early undertaking, which I also described as “before Ligeti started sounding like Ligeti.” However, if he had not yet undertaken the thick one-to-a-part textures of “Atmosphères,” one can appreciate the give-and-take rhetoric as the score oscillates between the atonal themes and the thick textures of the full ensemble. In other words, it was through his composition of this quartet Ligeti “found his voice,” which would encourage him to explore those thick textures.

In that context, both the Mozart and Schubert quartets could not have been given better performances as models of transparency. In both of these cases, the counterpoint was so clear that I could easily keep my glance shifting from one instrumentalist to another. Both of these were (at least for me) familiar compositions. Nevertheless, the clarity of the delivery was so compelling that I almost felt as if I had encountered both of these pieces for the very first time.

On my way home from Herbst Theatre, I realized that the in-the-moment spontaneity of the players was chamber music as it should be, possibly even as it was “back in the day” when Mozart played viola in a quartet with violinists Joseph Haydn and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and cellist Johann Baptist Wanhal.