Music review: Balourdet Quartet, alongside Zuill Bailey, communicates emotions, richness of works at Northwest BachFest

To kick off the spring season of the Northwest BachFest, Artistic Director Zuill Bailey brought the Balourdet String Quartet to Barrister Winery for two inspirational concerts.

They were inspirational for several reasons, all of which contributed to the extraordinarily vivid and insightful playing of the quartet, which consists of violinists Angela Bae and Justin DeFillipis, violist Benjamin Zannoni and Russell Houston, cellist. Theirs is a young group, founded, one might say, on love, rather than motivated by the necessities of career.

Bae, DeFillipis and Houston were classmates at the Taos School of music, where they began playing chamber music together, as either the prelude to or aftermath of a good meal. Soon, they found that they could not do without the pleasure of one another’s companionship and musicianship. Bae shelved her plans for a solo career, and they went hunting for a sympathetic violist to cement their determination to launch a professional string quartet. They soon encountered Zannoni at Rice University, recognizing him as the ideal figure to complete the picture they had in mind of an ensemble capable of conveying to others the joy they found in making music together.

The sheer scope and variety of their programs was a foreshadowing of the type of performance we could expect. It encompassed the history of Western music from the Baroque – Francois Couperin, Pieces en Concert for Cello and String Quartet (1724) – through the Classical – Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 64 #5, “The Lark,” and Beethoven’s final String Quartet in F major Op. 135 (1826) – through the Romantic – Schubert’s “Arpeggione Sonata” (1824), Paganini’s Variations on a Theme from Rossini’s “Moses” (1819) and Smetana’s First String Quartet, “From My Life” (1876), up to the present day.

The contemporary works they offered us demand special notice, because they most completely embody the inspirational spirit that flowed through everything else on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. To begin with, they were composed by friends, teachers and colleagues of the Balourdet Quartet, who were granted the means to sponsor or commission these works, thus ensuring that the joy they found in the existing repertoire would send up new shoots and tendrils into the future. Two of these works were premiered just last year: Paul Novak’s (b. 1999) “Impossible Inventions” and Nicky Sohn’s (b. 1992) “Galaxy Back to You.” The greybeard among the contemporary composers was the aged Karim Al-Zand (b. 1970), whose fabulously imaginative “Strange Machines” emitted a voltage so intense as to be visible from space.

Judging from the extravagant technical difficulty of all of the contemporary works, their composers plainly have a very high opinion of every member of the Balourdet Quartet, an opinion that was fully justified by the virtuosity they displayed.

Every technique of bowing and tone production known to the professional string player – and some that are still unknown – was required by all of the contemporary works, though the effect was never one of empty virtuosity. In these works, as in the older works on the program, the quartet’s goal was always to communicate their emotional content as powerfully as possible.

Al-Zand’s “Strange Machines” is a fantastically witty and imaginative exploration of every resource available to the string quartet to express feelings of exaltation, foreboding, joy and melancholy. In “Galaxy Back to You,” Nicky Sohn is equally resourceful in expressing quite different feelings: the passionate longing and tenderness she felt for the man who, in his role as an astrophysicist, named a remote galaxy after her and who eventually became her husband.

Paul Novak also seems to have nothing more to learn about writing for string quartet. The title of his “Impossible Inventions” suggests how difficult it is to perform, and yet, it is of the three contemporary works we heard the one that most clearly tied to the tradition of Haydn and Beethoven in its maintenance of a steady pulse, skillful transitions between sections and careful deployment of musical material among the four voices.

As beguiling and delightful as the sound-worlds created by the contemporary composers might have been, none surpassed the impact of the oldest work performed by the Balourdet Quartet: the “Pieces en Concert,” by Francois Couperin. As the opening work of Friday’s concert, it filled the room with a cloud of color of such astonishing richness and variety as to make us wonder whether we had ever heard its like before. From the midst of this aura came an instantly arresting voice; it was the unmistakable playing of Bailey, who took the solo part in the Couperin suite, as he did later in Schubert’s “Arpeggione Sonata” and the Paganini “Moses Variations.”

It goes without saying that in this, as in all the works in which he appeared, Bailey retained his unique musical voice, while adapting it to the stylistic demands of works composed in different centuries and differing artistic eras. In the same way, the Balourdet Quartet demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt their tonal palette to the demands of the work at hand. In this, they differ very much from celebrated quartets of the past, which bathed every work, whether by Mozart or Bartok, in their signature sonority. One sign of the Balourdets’ detachment from this practice (and one that we also observed with the Attaca String Quartet in their Northwest BachFest appearances) was the switching of their two violinists between the first and second chairs.

This is not as trivial as it might sound. Since the earliest days of string quartet playing – in the time of Haydn – the occupant of the first chair dominated every aspect of performance. Many lovers of string quartet playing can easily tick off the names of such first-chair players of famous quartets as Joseph Roisman (Budapest String Quartet), Norbert Brainin (Amadeus String Quartet) or Robert Mann (Juilliard String Quartet), while having to check Wikipedia for the names of the other players.

The Balourdets, however, while never sacrificing perfection of ensemble, are careful to retain the unique character of each player. This removes all limits to their exploration of the emotional extremes of works as diverse as Beethoven’s Op. 135 String Quartet – his last completed work – and the Quartet “From My Life” by the Czech Bedrich Smetana, composer of such well-known and well-loved works as “The Moldau,” from his orchestral magnum opus “My Country,” and the ground-breaking opera “The Bartered Bride.”

Anyone who heard the Balourdets’ performance of the Smetana Quartet will find it hard to forget. It is a profoundly emotional work, evoking every feeling from the joy of youthful achievement to the contentment of middle-age renown to the sudden, shocking awareness of encroaching deafness.

Justin DeFilippis, in first chair, played with passionate conviction throughout the work, projecting every emotion with great intensity, whether it be robust jocularity or bleak despair. His fervent duetting with the sharply focused, lyrical voice of Angela Bae, whose dazzling technique betrays her soloistic training, was especially memorable. So was the characterful projection of cellist Russell Houston, who provided far more than the discreet low-end support one usually encounters from someone sitting in his chair. Likewise, here as throughout the entire program, Benjamin Zannoni provided the ensemble with a greater degree of vitality and emotional specificity than is commonly believed possible on the viola.