Sensational Finale For Quartet

Spokane String Quartet Friday, June 5, The Met

The Spokane String Quartet was able to guarantee a sensational finale to its 1997-98 season Friday at The Met. The group invited a brilliant young pianist, Sean Botkin, as a guest artist. The quartet played a powerful work by a composer for whose style these players have shown a particular affinity. And the concert included the added treat of a rarely-performed classical quartet.

The performance itself was thrillingly fine.

Composer Franz Krommer is scarcely a household name, even among musicians. He deserves better, and the Spokane String Quartet treated him right with a performance of his Quartet, Op. 24. No. 2, that showed both its finish and its freshness.

First violinist Kelly Farris deftly wove Krommer’s elaborate figuration around the slower moving parts. But Krommer gave Farris’s colleagues - violinist Jane Blegen, violist Karen Walthinsen and cellist John Marshall - plenty of opportunities to shine as they traded ideas that included gypsy dances and harmonies that forecast the sounds Dvorak would use 70 years later.

Over past seasons, the Spokane Quartet has shown how Dmitri Shostakovich puts his most intimate thoughts into his strings quartets. His symphonies are his public oratory, but the quartets are monologues from the heart. For me, the group’s performance of Shostakovich’s Third String Quartet, was the high point of the evening and of the season.

This quartet, written in 1946, is Shostakovich’s memory album of the Second World War. The frantic gaiety, the tearful laments, the anger, the mechanical roar of machines and the sound of men marching are all stored in the 30 or so minutes of highly demanding music.

The Spokane players never allowed the intensity to flag, from the opening banal dance tune to the eerie whistle which slowly evaporates at the last note. The performance deserved both the initial stunned silence of the audience and the acclaim of the three curtain calls the group received.

Botkin joined the quartet for a sizzling performance of one of chamber music’s most deservedly popular works, Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major. Botkin combines a virtuoso technique with an uncommon sensitivity to the music he performs and to the players with whom he performs. Members of the quartet were equally responsive.

Schumann’s quintet shows the composer’s multi-layered personality through its swift mood changes and emotion-drenched rhetoric. Schumann’s melodies are wonderful and his harmonies inventive, but Friday’s performance brought his ingenuity in the inner voices of the texture, such as those dialogs between viola and cello, between piano and second violin.

The imaginative programming and vitally intense playing made this easily one of the finest concerts of this, or any, season.