String quartet leaves audience shaken, stirred

Concertgoers who value the soothing quality of chamber music or its aristocratic aloofness must have experienced a shock or two at Sunday’s Spokane String Quartet concert at The Met. The program’s quartets by Haydn and Dvorak provided some earthy, vigorous fun. But the Quartet No. 13 by Shostakovich delivered emotional jolts normally associated with opera or heavy-duty symphonic music.

The afternoon got under way with Joseph Hadyn’s String Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 76, No. 4, sometimes called the “Sunrise” Quartet. Haydn spent his career serving a series of counts and princes, but somehow there was always a little mud on his boots. The serene opening whose rising melody gives the work its nickname immediately gave way to stuff that edged toward the boisterous level. And the Spokane players exploited the bold peasant swagger of the minuet movement and the headlong rush at the end of the finale.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 13 is one of the least frequently performed of his quartets. It is easy to hear why even fine players shy away from it: It is an emotionally loaded work with two slow but unsettling sections framing a faster, hallucinatory section.

The central section has strange tapping rhythms, sudden lunges of sound, dense clusters of buzzing trills and distorted jazz licks. The latter part of the work requires the players to hit the body of their instruments with the woods of their bows. Sound awful? Well, yes, but the work proved beautifully awesome.

Shostakovich produced a work that seems to be running a very high fever. He was never a composer who chose to explain in words what his music “meant,” but the four Spokane String Quartet players – violinists Kelly Farris and Tana Bachman, violist Jeanette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne – clearly had it figured out as much as any group of musicians can. And they made Sunday’s performance a gripping experience. Wee-Yang brought a special intensity to the work’s famously difficult viola part.

Like Haydn, Antonin Dvorak grew up in the country. And like Haydn, Dvorak’s music is a combination of learning and innocence. In Sunday’s performance of Dvorak’s Quartet in G major, Op. 106, it was hard to know what to admire most. Was it the maturity of Dvorak’s intricate interplay of the four interdependent string parts? Was it the youthful-sounding melodies and lusty dancing? Was it the meditative slow movement that seems so loaded with memories? For this listener, it was all of the above

This concert found the players of the Spokane String Quartet performing a beautifully balanced program at the top of their form. Such masterful music making deserved a full house rather than the small group of chamber music loyalists who were moved, maybe even a bit shaken, on this sunny afternoon.