Concert review: With precision and intensity, Juilliard String Quartet brings expanded and unique concert to Barrister Winery in Classics Northwest’s debut
Two remarkable concerts took place this weekend at Barrister Winery that are sure to merit mention in any history of musical life in Spokane, and remain vividly alive in the memories of everyone who had the good fortune of attending.
To mark the first concerts of Northwest BachFest under its new banner of Classics Northwest, Music Director Zuill Bailey reached into his impresario’s hat and drew out the most famous and most highly esteemed name in the world of American chamber music: the Juilliard String Quartet.
Founded in 1946 at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, the group experienced many changes of personnel, but for 50 years enjoyed the leadership of a single extraordinary musician, Robert Mann, who occupied the First Violin chair until his retirement in 1997. During this time, the group established an unequaled reputation for superb musicianship and revelatory interpretation. There are now several hundred people in Spokane who can attest to the fact that the four artists currently entrusted with that reputation are fully worthy of it. Those artists are Areta Zhulla, first violin; Leonard Fu, second violin; Molly Carr, viola; and Astrid Shween, cello. In their performance of the Schubert String Quintet, Bailey joined them to take the part of second cello.
To say that the playing that resonated through Barrister Winery matched the high standards of those on the many recordings made by the JSQ (as they call themselves) in the 1950s and ’60s is not, however, to suggest that they are the same. They are not, nor should they be, since the musical world from which they emerge, and the audiences they hope to move, have changed so much over the past half-century.
For one thing, several generations have listened to and absorbed recorded performances of the Juilliard String Quartet and to come to regard what was once new and startling as the accepted standard. To be true to its heritage, the current quartet must sing with a unique voice and focus renewed attention on the over-familiar, and this they do astonishingly well.
An informal poll of the audience following Sunday’s performance produced responses of “Wow!”, “I never expected that,” and “Unbelievable!” from people of very considerable experience in concert music. They were reacting to attributes of the playing of the JSQ that they felt set them apart from other ensembles. These attributes appeared throughout both programs and were employed to increase the impact that all the works had on us:
Commitment to new music: Part of the initial mandate that created the JSQ was that they ”play the standard repertoire with the sense of excitement and discovery of a new work and play new works with a reverence usually reserved for the classics.” Michelle Barzel Ross’s “Birds on the Moon” is a captivating new work composed on commission by the JSQ. It leads the audience through an ever-shifting audioscape of melodic motifs, imitations of natural sounds and startling effects that are unexpected, yet familiar, as in a dream. The composer demonstrates tremendous skill in presenting such a variety of musical utterance so convincingly and with perfect aesthetic coherence.
One could say the same of the Quartet’s performance of “Popular Dances,” composed for them by Leonard Fu, their Second Violin. It could scarcely be more different in tone and mood from “Birds on the Moon,” but matches it in ingenuity, accessibility and technical difficulty.
Expanded sound palette. It would be impossible to perform either of these new works without employing techniques of sound production that quartets of an earlier period would never have considered using, yet the JSQ has incorporated them even into their performance of works by Schubert and Brahms in a way that brings new life to these traditional masterpieces, while never violating their stylistic integrity. They will, for example, reduce the pressure they place on the bow, while eliminating vibrato in their left hand, thus producing a pale, almost fragmented tone that nonetheless conveys great emotional power when used with such taste and discretion. At the other end of the sonic spectrum, they are not afraid to come down on the string with percussive force, producing a sound of shocking intensity, as we heard in the Third Movement of the Shostakovich Seventh String Quartet, which seemed to explode like a bomb on the stage, or during Fu’s “Popular Dances,” where it evoked the hubbub of a barn full of dancers.
Precision. Extreme effects of this kind are capable of reducing a performance to chaos if they are not synchronized exactly and performed with precise control by all the players involved. Earlier iterations of the JSQ set standards in precise performance that had worldwide influence; indeed, they altered expectations of string quartet performance forever. Even in this context, the ensemble performing only a few feet from us at Barrister Winery was astonishing in the exactness with which bowings started and ended, phrases swelled and vanished, and colors bloomed and faded.
Expressive intensity. At some point in his 50-year tenure, Robert Mann remarked, “The thing about the Juilliard is that we’re hell-bent on a perfect catharsis.” That was very obvious to us. From the very opening of the Shostakovich Quartet, we were struck by the group’s determination to maximize the lyrical power of each phrase by taking advantage of the full dynamic range of their instruments. This allowed them to express elements of personal anguish in Shostakovich that often lie hidden under a veil of sarcasm, and of romantic rapture in Brahms that is usually masked by the academic perfection of his counterpoint. Brahms’ string quartets are commonly regarded as the least interesting of his chamber works. If only the critics who set down such opinions had had the chance to hear what we heard!
The attentive reader may have noticed that I have made no mention as yet of Schubert’s sublime C major String Quintet, which closed the concert on Sunday afternoon. There will be no critical analysis here of that performance, apart from to say that what we heard achieved a level of artistic perfection to which all musicians aspire but few attain.
I do not hope ever to be brought closer than I was then to the heart of the mystery that lies at the heart of all great music.