Edgar Meyer Returns to SFP Along with Dover

Edgar Meyer with his bass (photograph by Jim McGuire, courtesy of SFP)

Bassist Edgar Meyer presented his first recital with San Francisco Performances (SFP) in December of 1991, long before writing about the performance of music ever entered my mind. He returned last night making his twelfth appearance in Herbst Theatre. He contributed two of his own compositions, a set of two duets for cello and bass and a piece entitled “Quintet for Strings.” He was joined by the Dover String Quartet, whose members are violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, Hezekiah Leung on viola, and cellist Camden Shaw. Meyer’s addition was a departure from the usual string quintet.

Each of Meyer’s pieces was preceded by music from an earlier century. The program began with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 136 divertimento in D major. This is usually performed by a string ensemble, but the one-to-a-part performance by Dover struck me as a more engaging approach. The quartet also performed Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 80 (sixth) quartet in F minor. This was the one offering on the program that struck me as overwrought, possibly because it was composed in a dark period near the end of the composer’s life.

Meyer’s name will probably be familiar to those that have followed this site (as will as its Examiner.com predecessor) for some time. His performances have been consistently engaging, and his music has been performed by others here in San Francisco. Indeed, a little less than two years ago, two movements from his 1999 Concert Duo were performed by San Francisco Symphony bassist Daniel G. Smith and violinist David Chernyavsky. Sadly, the sense of playfulness that Smith and Chernyavsky evoked never quite came to the surface last night, whether in Meyer’s own music or in the earlier compositions.

Perhaps Dover did not provide the right partnership for Meyer, and I am hoping that I shall not have to wait too long to encounter both his music had his approach to performance in a more conducive setting.