Glowing Sound From Lafayette String Quartet

Lafayette String Quartet Sunday, Jan. 29, The Met

Competing with the Super Bowl for an audience would seem a futile exercise, even for a chamber music series. But the Spokane Chamber Music Association did it anyway, landing the Lafayette String Quartet right in the middle of the year’s Big Game on Sunday.

The sizable audience at The Met was attentive and enthusiastic, as well they might have been. The Lafayette players - violinists Ann ElliottGoldschmidt and Sharon Stanis, violist Joanna Hood and cellist Pamela Highbaugh-Aloni - are now in their 11th season together. Their intensity and single-mindedness are the equal of any team of athletes.

Lafayette members perform on a set of 17th-century Amati instruments. These instruments, on loan from the University of Saskatchewan, produce a dark, mellow sound that is well-suited to chamber music. It was a sound that glowed even in the dry acoustical environment of The Met.

Sunday’s program began, as many string quartet performances do, with Haydn. The Lafayette’s treatment of Haydn’s Op. 20, No. 4 appeared, at first, to be satisfying without being especially distinctive. The musical dialogs between pairs of instruments were well-matched, unforced and almost conversational in tone.

Only in the set of variations that make up the second movement did it become clear how deeply these players were involved with Haydn’s intricate play of ideas. By the time the “Gypsy” Minuet and its peculiar countrified accents rolled around, the listener was aware this was, indeed, stylish Haydn, not just a generic, 18th-century gentility that would suit Mozart, Haydn or Dittersdorf equally well.

The afternoon’s greatest hit was Leos Janacek’s unnervingly lurid Quartet No. 1. The composer subtitled the work “The Kreutzer Sonata,” not in reference to Beethoven’s sonata for violin and piano, but because it was inspired by Tolstoy’s novella about an imagined infidelity which led to murder. A husband grows insane as he imagines that his wife, a pianist, is making love with a violinist with whom she enjoys only music making.

The work is chilling. It combines tension-filled sound effects - raging shrieks and thumping pizzicatos - with beautiful but uneasy melodies and a recurring dance tune that fragments as the husband goes mad.

Here the Lafayette closed the door on Haydn’s enlightened world, and entered wholeheartedly into the neurotic darkness of Janacek and Tolstoy.

To find Janacek’s morbid masterpiece next to late-Beethoven seemed, at first, an odd juxtaposition. Not so. Beethoven’s dream-like Op. 131 made a great program mate with Janacek’s nightmarish Quartet No. 1. The Lafayette performance brought out the very rational quality of Beethoven’s most “modernsounding” music.

Cellist Pamela Highbaugh-Aloni introduced the Beethoven quartet as the most personal “philosophical journey” in all his quartets. I had always imagined it as a musical reverie in which Beethoven takes one musical idea and allows it to remind him of other ideas which reflect sometimes violent changes of mood. Beethoven’s notorious anger and anguish are here, but so is his gentler thoughts and his almost manic humor. The Lafayette captured it all in a treasurable performance.

In introducing the program, Spokane String Quartet cellist John Marshall promised a post-concert scrimmage between the Lafayette and the Spokane String quartets, but the concert’s only real concession to the afternoon’s “competing event” was Kelly Farris’ announcement of the Super Bowl score, following intermission.