Intense Beethoven Opus 130
The Fine Arts Quartet burns up Beethoven, lulls with Hermann, and plays Beach that makes you go "hmmm..."
Michel Lethiec. Photo courtesy of Joanne Rile Artists Management.
The Fine Arts Quartet has in recent years made something of a hobby of Bernard Hermann, best known for his nerve-racking score for Psycho. Hermann was among the greatest of film composers, but the charms the FAQ finds in his concert music have thus far eluded me.
Sunday, violinists Ralph Evans and Efim Boico, violist Nicolò Eugelmi, cellist Robert Cohen and guest clarinetist Michel Lethiec took up Hermann’s Souvenir de Voyage. The illustrative music suggests a Mediterranean cruise from the French Riviera to the Italian Riviera. The shimmering marine textures of Ravel and Debussy abound in the first two movements. The last opens with what might be a quaint Neapolitan love song played in thirds between the two violins.
A gently lapping barcarole seems to crop up in all three movements, as the mood rarely rises from a gentle murmur. The first and second movements have so much in common that I lost track of our latitude and longitude. The audience broke into applause, mistaking completion of the second movement for the third. Or maybe that was the patrons’ way of asking, “Are we there, yet?”
Souvenir followed Amy Beach’s relatively somber, mellow String Quartet in One Movement, begun in 1921 and completed in 1929. Incantatory recitatives for viola, which Eugelmi delivered with striking authority, mark off the structural divisions of a rough arch form. A slow, meandering chord progression and an allegro weaving of three Inuit melodies (according to Timothy Noonan’s program notes), are the other components.
Beach makes the form clear enough and the FAQ played the piece decently enough, but the music passed with no particular focus or sense of shifting dramatic impetus. The players have the notes under their fingers, but it sounds as if they haven’t quite decided what to do with them. I have a hunch that Beach’s rarely played quartet might be lovelier the second time around with the Fine Arts Quartet.
Evans, Boico, Eugelmi and Cohen knew just what they wanted to do with Beethoven’s Opus 130: Put it in a pressure cooker and turn the flame high.
Fine Arts Quartet, Evans, Boico, Cohen, Eugelmi.
Opus 130 was as fast and intense as Souvenir was slow and sleepy. The players went too far only in the Presto, taken at such a pace that articulation and intonation suffered and the leading sentiments were haste and strain. But mostly, the FAQ produced exciting, virtuosic and highly dramatic Beethoven. The lyric tune in the fifth movement began as a love song but expanded into the most ardent, overarching hymn. Instead of a lilting respite in three-quartet time, the danza tedesca became an urgent, almost dogged thing. They fully realized Beethoven’s thwarted impulses, contrarian ways and bigger-than-life emotions.
Don’t miss anything. Bookmark Matthew Reddin’s complete guide to the 2012-13 season, sponsored by the Florentine Opera. And consult Danielle McClune’s weekly On Stage column, published every Tuesday.
