Week of February 1, 2010
Daniel Hathaway, editor & publisher
Commentary
Concert
Report
Rocky River Chamber Music Society: The Jasper String Quartet
by Daniel Hathaway
America's numerous chamber music
societies must have some difficult choices to make when shopping for
string quartets these days: in addition to all the distinguished older
quartets on the concert circuit, young ensembles have been popping up
like mushrooms and there are many fine ones to choose from. The Rocky
River Chamber Music Society made an excellent choice last Monday evening
(January 25) in presenting the Jasper Quartet. The
concert was held in the amiable acoustical setting of West Shore
Unitarian Universalist Church.Formed at Oberlin just a few years ago, polished at Rice and now serving as the graduate quartet at Yale where they're being mentored by the Tokyo Quartet, the Jaspers display amazing maturity for such a young group and bring chameleon-like qualities to their interpretation of works in different styles. The present membership includes founders J Freivogel, first violin, Sam Quintal, viola and Rachel Henderson Freivogel, cello, and a later addition -- Sae Niwa on second violin. They take their name from a national park in the Canadian province of Alberta, "a place unmatched for its inherent and dramatic beauty – qualities integral to the Jasper’s belief in the power of string quartet performance".
Monday night's concert was intriguingly constructed. It began with a thoroughly classical work, Beethoven's op. 18, no. 1, continued with a rarely played early Webern piece from the very late Post-Romantic era, then five pieces in the later style we've come to identify with that composer. Then after intermission, the crowd pleasing and heart warming 'Ma Vlast' by Smetena.
The Jaspers impressed from the first notes of the Beethoven, producing a tight, well blended sound and finely terraced dynamics, passing motives off from one player to the other with striking similarity of tone. The slow movement boasted lots of color changes and great agogic attacks preceded by dramatic breaths (yes, string players have their own way of 'breathing' before a downbeat). The scherzo was marked by fine accents and contrasts -- here was Intense playing without exaggeration, and a remarkable transparency of texture. Beginning delicately, the finale continued to live in a sonic world of classical proportions in a well behaved work that precedes Beethoven's pushing of the formal envelope. This is a smiling work, and the Jaspers seemed to be having a good time with it.
Sam Quintal picked up a microphone to assuage the fears of audience members about the forthcoming Webern. "It's scary for us, too, but we programmed the pieces in this order to show where the scary stuff comes from". First up, the "incredibly romantic" 'Langsamer Satz', then the 'Five Movements' in Webern's famous later abstract style. Quintal went on to say that the quartet found the later pieces to be perplexing until they learned the 'Langsamer Satz' and discovered where Webern's later style came from -- the result of his search for "a different route to expressiveness".
The first work, composed in 1905 and inspired by an Austrian hiking trip with Webern's future wife, could easily have been mistaken for a work by Richard Strauss. Beginning with a rich viola solo passed seamlessly off to the second violin, this piece showed that the Jaspers can morph instantly from a classical sound into a big romantic one -- using an admirable palette of different kinds of vibrato for coloristic purposes. A cello solo was exquisitely accompanied by the upper strings before the piece ended with a high, intense climax. Billed as a 13-minute work, the Jaspers brought it in at a mere nine minutes, but with no sense of haste.
Morphing yet again, the Jaspers gave a lucid account of the 'Five Movements', written only four years after the 'Langsamer Satz' but in fact separated by a whole musical revolution. Assured opulence has now been replaced by the lean, the terse, the nervous and the spooky. Webern's catalogue of extended string sounds has become standard vocabulary for many avant-garde works in the intervening century, but these little pieces still have the capacity to sound fresh and unsettling, and the Jaspers played them with complete commitment.
After intermission the Jaspers invoked yet another, folksier tonal world with Smetana's first quartet, subtitled "From My Life", taking on the musical dialect of Bohemia. Sam Quintal again took the mic to lead the audience through a little synopsis of this autobiographical work. He warned that its happy moments were frequently darkened by forboding: "something's going to go wrong". But the performance was anything but dark. Passionate solos from each of the four players leapt out appropriately from the ensemble in the first movement. The quartet expertly manipulated tempo and rhythm in the second movement Polka, giving a fine impression of a drunken accordion player. A big cello solo was passed off beautifully to the first violin in the Largo, with an intense chorale in mid-movement and well-managed mood changes. The final vivace restored the festive qualities of the beginning of the piece with broad accents and dramatic bow strokes. After the famous high e's representing Smetana's impending loss of hearing, the Jaspers also demonstrated that they could make a few intentionally ugly sounds for dramatic effect before bringing the work to a conclusion in a flurry of trills and pizzicati.
Keep an ear on the Jasper Quartet. Their programming savvy and keen adaptability to different musical styles made this concert a memorable experience for the near-capacity crowd.
