In Loose but Fantastic Formation

By Michelle Dulak Thomson

There was half an hour to go before the concert, but if you happened to be standing outside St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco at 3:30 on Saturday you could hear them. Just a few highly trained people, a few feet apart, yet formidably strong and utterly fearless — powering through their chosen medium at alarming speed and with frightening precision …

New Esterházy Quartet

What, the New Esterházy Quartet canceled and the Emerson Quartet filled in at short notice? No, silly, I’m talking about the Blue Angels. The six stunt-flying F/A-18 pilots, in town for Fleet Week, appeared to be using St. Mary’s Cathedral (across the street from St. Mark’s) as a sighting landmark, so that early arrivals to the New Esterházys’ all-Haydn program got an unexpectedly, not to say unnervingly, close demonstration of precision diamond-formation flying. The Angels’ performance was over by the time the NEQ’s began, though I gather that the thunder from the skies played merry hell with the quartet’s sound check.

For most people, great string quartet playing isn’t quite as impressive as great formation flying, even where the level of control involved is similarly superhuman. There are good reasons for that. For one thing, most folks don’t listen to string quartets. For another, when a string quartet player does something unexpected on a whim, ordinarily no one dies.

That was a good thing Saturday. Between the mechanical failures (unstable gut strings, slipping pegs) and the not-always-consonant instincts of the players, a precision-flying exposition arranged in imitation of the New Esterházy program would have been the sort of thing for which you’d make sure your life insurance was paid up before attending.

But, then, so would an expedition into any strange and wonderful wilderness. And the New Esterházys, as so often during their trek through the complete Haydn quartets, proved infallible guides even where they were fallible players, through a part of the quartet repertoire where beaten paths are few.

Haydn Sings Out

This program, the first of the NEQ’s second season, was titled “Haydn at the Opera,” with the focus being on slow movements that savor of the stage. Two of these — in Op. 33/6 and Op. 1/2 — are pure arias, with the first violin doing the singing. In the other two, though, there’s something more like a full operatic scena, with the diva/first violin breaking into (wordless) recitative.

In the Pantheon of nicknamed Haydn quartets, Op. 17/5 sometimes makes an appearance as “The Recitative.” Op. 20/2 belongs to a set none of whose quartets, astonishingly, has ever gotten a nickname that stuck. (Among the general public, that is — if you refer in the presence of veteran quartet players to “that juicy C-major one with the cello part,” most will know which you mean, apart from a hardcore-Haydn-geek few who will be thinking of Op. 54/2.) The New Esterházys themselves call it “The Mad Scene,” which is apt.

It was this work that came last, as it should have done. Even apart from the slow movement, it’s a piece crammed with riches, beginning with the luxuriant cello solo that opens the first movement and ending with a fugal finale that almost bursts with Haydn’s peculiarly genial sort of ingenuity. (It’s a four-voiced fugue with four subjects, and an al rovescio — that is, inverted, with the bits that went down in the original now going up, the bits originally going up now going down — flourish toward the end.)

And that slow movement is an amazing creation, for its time or any. The theme is a jagged unison line, later harmonized as a cello solo (William Skeen, here, was magnificently poised) with pulsing chords above it, and interrupted continually by theatrical outbursts from either the first violin or all four players. There’s an interlude like an embryo aria, but the unison stuff breaks in there, as well, and after a couple of attempts to restart itself, the music runs directly into the next movement.

Lisa Weiss was the first violinist for both this and the G-major Op. 17/5, which meant that she had the afternoon’s instrumental recitative to herself. If the Op. 20 quartets are beloved of string quartet players, everything before them tends to be written off; I doubt that anyone apart from Saturday’s ensemble has performed even one of the Op. 17 quartets publicly in the Bay Area in the last two decades.

Meat on the Bones

The Op. 20 quartets are special, being uncannily rich. Yet hearing Op. 17/5 makes you realize how much the reputation of Op. 20 depends on its meaty cello parts. This quartet doesn’t let the cello (or the viola) off the leash nearly so much as the Op. 20 quartets do, yet all the quirkiness of Op. 20 is in there: the playful messing around with meter; the abrupt and sometimes jarring harmonic shocks; the trick of doing the same thing just enough times that the first time something else happens, you can’t help but grin.

Kati Kyme was the first violin in the other two quartets, which seemed a fair division of labor: Weiss, the more forceful personality, for the scenes of emotional turmoil, and Kyme, the more suave, for the sweet singing. In Op. 1/2, her aria was (as violist Anthony Martin pointed out in his preperformance remarks) a light thing, almost an open-air serenade. The entire quartet plays a couple of phrases pizzicato at the end of each strain, as though the singing lover at the window had stopped to echo his song on a mandolin. In Op. 33/6 the aria is more serious business, though Kyme remained her elegant, infallibly persuasive self.

For the rest: Well, this was quartet flying in loose formation: both joyous and alert, but never so militantly alert as to stifle the joy. True, there were a few missed leaps and fuzzy unisons and not-quite-together arrivals. There was also the sort of dynamic nuance that implies a lot of thinking about the music. (Menuets, which get played through three times, always got some sort of new shaping by the NEQ the last time through.)

And there were places where everything did come together, and suddenly you couldn’t hear the music any other way. I think I’ll cherish for a long time the NEQ’s insinuatingly feline version of Op. 20/2’s main fugue subject.

If you want to hear Haydn quartets as they were meant to be heard, the only real course is to find three string-instrument-playing friends and perform them yourself. Or, if you want to hear them played immaculately, there are always the quartet-equivalents of the Blue Angels. But if neither option appeals, there is the New Esterházy Quartet — with four concerts remaining to its project. The schedule is here.

Michelle Dulak Thomson in San Francisco Classical Voice
http://www.sfcv.org/content/loose-fantastic-formation

From reviews of the first two concerts of the New Esterházy Quartet’s Haydn Cycle:

Performing in St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco on Sunday afternoon, violinists Kati Kyme and Lisa Weiss, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist William Skeen presented a program of four quartets that summarized Haydn's oeuvre, and provided a foretaste of delights to come. Beginning with No. 29 was a brilliant move…The New Esterházy Quartet negotiated the many contrasts of the large first movement with alacrity, providing a reading that was musically satisfying and thoroughly entertaining… For the second work on the program, Weiss and Kyme traded places, a democratic move that typifies the closeness between the members of this group, as well as their superior ensemble talents… After a delicious arialike Adagio, the quartet danced in another parallel-laden minuet, followed by an aggressive, chunky finale that could have been an early inspiration for Metallica. Weiss's head-banging chords at the end were awesome…Haydn's stays in London in the 1790s solidified his reputation, and the two later quartets the New Esterházys presented should solidify their standing, as well…The highlight of this quartet [Op76/5] is the achingly lyrical Largo: Cantabile e mesto (singing and sad), which positively drips with romantic moments. In a break with convention, Haydn chose to write this movement in F-sharp major…Although the key is anathema to string players, the Quartet brought out all of its sonorous potential. A rollicking, scherzolike minuet was followed by an even jollier finale, replete with the drones and stomps of a barn dance. It was truly a pleasure to see such an accomplished group of musicians present these four quartets. Yet the New Esterházy Quartet's true strength is not in the individual talents they all possess, but in the lively exchange and obvious joy they share as an ensemble. I am all ears for the next 17 programs.;

Rebekah Ahrendt, in San Francisco Classical Voice ;
http://www.sfcv.org/content/hail-new-esterházys

Skeen on cello appeared to be having the time of his life in the third movement of the Op. 1 Divertimento, finding time to shape little musical “gasping” gestures audible amid the thicket of sound. Other groups might have been tempted to blaze through a little piece like this, marked presto and filled with little fioratura ornamentation. The New Esterházys, however, are clearly enamored with Haydn’s capacity to generate unique experiences for each player, while still presenting a well-balanced whole. Throughout the concert the instrumentalists smiled at every witticism, were startled at every sudden modulation or quirky turn of phrase, and drove through the composer’s virtuoso passagework as if they were the most difficult sections ever played… What I perceived were deceptive cadences that really deceived, sudden changes in modality and dynamic that were breathtaking, contrapuntal complexity, and a carefully controlled and contained excitement that felt ready to explode at any moment …freshness, vitality, intelligence, poignancy, intimacy, and thrills. There’s little more that you could hope for from a chamber-music concert.

Jonathan Rhodes Lee, in San Francisco Classical Voice
http://www.sfcv.org/content/haydn-chronicle

A Personal Review of “The Horseman and The Hunt”

Oct. 19th, 2007:

To the New Esterhazy Quartet:

My three companions and I are still glowing from the beautiful concert you gave last night at the Palo Alto First Lutheran Church. Not only did you play the Haydn with great verve and insight, but the warm church acoustics helped to make it a truly memorable listening experience. We congratulate the four of you, and thank you enthusiastically for your efforts!

It was our happy assumption that you would be playing all of Haydn’s quartets locally, and our only disappointment of the evening was to discover that we were attending the ONLY one. At least we got to enjoy that. Unfortunately, our advanced years make it too difficult to make the drive to San Francisco to hear the others. And of course we would have missed the first two anyway. Perhaps the best answer for us is to have you record them all someday.

A personal note. I first became enchanted by chamber music as a lad, ushering for a series of concerts held in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. These were given in an intimate, quasi-living-room setting, with upholstered chairs casually arranged around the musicians—as close to a “chamber” atmosphere as the hotel could provide. The concerts were attended by several dozen formally-attired patrons, and to cater to their refined sensibilities, I had to dress in my first tuxedo. I no longer recall their names, but one quartet played everything without music and another’s first-violinist played left-handed. Later, under less austere circumstances (as a serviceman during WWII), I often heard the Budapest Quartet play in the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge auditorium at the Library of Congress in Washington. They became my gold standard.

I mention this early personal history to show that it really means something to me to say that your performance of Haydn gave me more pleasure than any other performance I ever heard in all those years. One facet of this was the revelation of hearing those quartets performed with gut strings and without (or with very subtle) vibrato. It resulted in a gorgeous sound, admirably suited to your thoughtful interpretations. I cherish its memory.

Sincerely . . . Don McDonald

mail@newesterhazy.org

(415) 520-0611