Philomusica Quartet

Again and again, in his String Quartet No. 1, Heitor Villa-Lobos makes you think the flower has hit full bloom, and yet another petal opens.

The mingled surprise and delight at such occurrences was but one of the pleasures at Sunday afternoon’s Philomusica Quartet program at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Violinists Jeanyi Kim and Alexander Mandl, violist Nathan Hackett and cellist Adrien Zitoun played the Villa-Lobos, Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Opus 11, and Alberto Ginastera’s Quartet No. 1 skillfully and with ears attuned to the special characteristics of each piece.

Their lush sound, generous vibrato and expressive flex served Villa-Lobos’ long, long melodies very well. In the four slow movements, the players found the momentum, the points of exhaustion of that momentum and the harmonic pivot points that energized further unfolding of melody. In the two speedier, dance-driven movements, they went for a more rough-hewn sound that yielded an earthy jollity, especially in the unlikely fugue of a finale.

Four of the six movements are here-and-gone glosses on Brazilian folk tunes. The Canconeta and Melancolia sound like expert glosses on Ravel, with the lines diving and darting through shimmering extended harmonies. The structures are simple as A-B-A, for the most part, texture, as much as material, delineates structure. Villa-Lobos contrasts equal-voice writing with solo-accompaniment style. That’s a fairly obvious strategy, and much about this music is obvious. It was not ground-breaking even when it was new, in 1915. But it is very pleasing.

Everyone knows Barber’s very moving, and very nearly worn-out, Adagio for Strings. It’s been used in movies, and so on. We don’t often hear it in its original context, as the centerpiece in the 1936 quartet (rev. 1943) that the Philomusica played Sunday.

The dark harmonies and violent, disjunct themes of the first movement suggest some cataclysm. It cries out for such an intense Adagio, which the Philomusica drove to a convincing climax and charged with vibrato that throbbed like a lump in the throat.

So far, so good for Barber. But the third movement makes it sound as if the composer gave up on the piece because he couldn’t top that Adagio.  A bit of pounding from the opening movement, and bada-bing, bada-boom we’re done. The ending felt anti-climactic, arbitrary and hasty, through no fault of the players.

Mandl and Kim’s program notes say that Ginastera drew on Argentine folk sources throughout the Quartet. If so, Argentina is a scarier place than I thought. The score abounds with spine-tingling horror effects: glassy glissandos in harmonics, snarling little figures played right on the bridge, bone-clacking taps of the wood of the bow on the strings, suspensful tremolos on grating harmonies built up in pryamid fashion. The second movement is a crazed and hurtling danse macabre in 6/8 and the finale is a devilish hoe-down.

The Philomusica brought a rough, edgy sound — worlds apart from the beauty they lavished on Villa-Lobos — to Ginastera’s 1949 quartet. That was just right, as was their lusty, hell-for-leather reading of this virtuosic rave-up.

The Philomusica brought us down from Ginastera’s fevered dream with a juicy reading of Carlos Gardel’s Por Una Cabeza, a vintage, urbane tango.