Above: the players of The St. Lawrence Quartet are Christopher Constanza, Lesley Robertson, Owen Dalby, and Geoff Nuttall; photo by Marco Borggreve
Author: Scoresby
Wednesday April 25th 2017 – On this rainy, dreary evening, the St. Lawrence String Quartet presented by Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, played a recital in Alice Tully Hall. Despite their notoriety, this was the first time I had the opportunity to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet live. I’ve heard their recent recording of John Adams’s concerto Absolute Jest, so was intrigued to hear them perform Mr. Adams’s second string quartet.
Luckily contrasting the weather outside, the first piece on the program was Haydn’s Quartet in C major for Strings, Hob. III:32, Op. 20 No. 2. In the opening moderato they had a light, tight style of playing. The playing was robust and resonant, it almost sounded like they were miked at time due to the quartet’s vibrato being well in sync.
During the second movement of particular note was Mr. Constanza’s beautifully dark color, which blended well into the rest of the quartet. They seemed to savor the silences in the music, giving lots of space to the thick chords. The fugal fourth movement was the most satisfying, played with a large dynamic range leading to close out the piece. The playing was quick, light, and precise – though textually changed into a drier sound.
Above: composer John Adams
The piece I was most curious about on the program was John Adams’s Quartet No. 2 for Strings, composed in 2014. The St. Lawrence String Quartet has had a long standing relationship with Mr. Adams in the past, writing his first string quartet, Absolute Jest, and this quartet for them. As a longtime John Adams fan, it was interesting to see how he continues to stylistically change even at the age of seventy. The first movement is based on the Scherzo from Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata. Mr. Adams takes a fragment of the melody and puts it through a kaleidoscope of key, timbre, and rhythmic transformations with the music rarely seeming to slow. There are a few rhythmic and textual nods to the Große Fuge as well as small references to the last piano sonata and other late Beethoven works.
While I typically think of Mr. Adams’s soundscape as open, here the writing was spidery and dense. For the most part, the instruments kept in similar ranges, never using extreme highs or lows. The cumulative effect felt claustrophobic. I appreciated Mr. Adams’s humor in taking these small fragments from Beethoven’s late period (which many scholars believe pushed tonality, rhythm, and structure forward) and pushing them through the wringer of different styles, expanding them further than Beethoven could have conceived. The players did well exhibiting all of the textual and rhythmic shifts – they performed in a wry way which made it easy to hear all of the textures in the dense writing.
The second movement is based around a fragment from the opening of Op. 111. The start of the movement is much quieter than other parts of the piece, and the writing seems to open up a little here. They played with subtlety during the first part of the movement, before switching to an impressively nimble style for a virtuosic finish based around one of the Diabelli Variations.
The second half of the program was also a work completely new to me: Saint-Saëns Quartet in E minor for Strings, Op. 112. Here the quartet was at their best. One of the most transporting moments of the concert were the opening chords of the first movement. Full of resonance with a mute on and playing the small ornamental flourishes that sounded like wisps from a cloud, the quartet managed to capture the French panache of Saint-Saëns’s writing.
The performers painted the two contrasting themes in the first movement well, managing to be both sweet and dark. The St. Lawrence has impeccable pianissimos – really being able to make their instruments sing while being utterly clear. The writing of this quartet is both highly structured and romantically rich – a nice blend of two different styles. There are also hints of modernity peppered in, which seems unusual for Saint-Saëns.
The third movement was performed beautifully, the most impressive part being the blending of the viola, second violin, and cello lines. While for the first part of the movement the instruments aren’t given more than accompanying lines – they managed to create a shifting backdrop for the solo violin line. Each chord was reminiscent of a master painter mixing and testing the gamut of colors. The pulsing finale was played with a muscly and full tone closing out the piece with flair.
As a sweet encore, the Quartet offered the slow movement of Haydn’s Op. 20 No. 1.
~ Scoresby
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