Spokane String Quartet Rises To The Challenge

Spokane String Quartet Sunday, Nov. 19, The Met

The Spokane String Quartet has undergone a radical change since it last appeared on The Met stage in June.

Two new members, violist Leslie Faye Johnson and cellist Helen Byrne, have joined violinists Kelly Farris and Jane Blegen. There is something scary about replacements - not quite like having two organ transplants at once, but close.

The good news was apparent from the opening bars of Mozart’s Quartet in G major, the first of six dedicated to Haydn. The ensemble’s sound was classically balanced among the four players. There was an alert sensitivity to phrasing as melodies were echoed or played together. And eight good ears were responsive to intonation.

There is a more subtle aspect of superior string quartet playing: a genuine pleasure in making music together. By the end of the afternoon - three demanding classics by Mozart, Beethoven and Bartok - it was my judgment that these four players do, indeed, enjoy making music together, and it made the concert a pleasure to hear.

Mozart must have had fun making some of Haydn’s compositional trademarks his own. The minuet, for example, is not Mozart’s typical courtly, graceful dance; it staggers a bit with deliberately misplaced accents (Haydn, a country boy, regularly pulled similar jokes in his own minuets). The trick is to make the joke clear without turning it into slapstick. The effect Sunday was just right, like a sophisticated courtier telling about someone drunkenly lurching into a minuet rather than having to see it.

For me, the centerpiece of the concert was Bartok’s String Quartet No. 1, which marked his “return to life” after his love was rejected by a beautiful young violinist. It begins with romantic anguish, goes through stages of anger and searching and ends with the confident Bartok in his most assertive Hungarian manner.

I was particularly impressed with Byrne’s short, rhapsodic cadenza in the finale and Johnson’s sharp-edged rhythms as she introduced the tune on which Bartok constructs a complex climactic fugue.

The concert’s final work was Beethoven’s challenging Op. 59, No. 3, the last of the three “Russian” quartets commissioned by Count Razumovsky.

The four players rose solidly to Beethoven’s demands, from the puzzling dissonances of the opening through the icy lyricism of the Andante and those treacherous interlocking scales of the Menuetto. They concluded by tearing into the fugal finale at a hair-raising tempo, leaving everyone - players and audience alike - exhilarated but exhausted.