Concert Review—

Talich String Quartet: Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts

By Wendy Wipprecht

On Sunday, November 22, Newtown Friends of Music sponsored the second concert of its 2009-10 season, a performance by the Talich String Quartet.

The concert opened with Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 12, by Felix Mendelssohn. This quartet, composed in 1829, when Mendelssohn was only twenty, shows the inescapable influence of Beethoven, who had died in 1827 and whose late string quartets had been published in the following year. Mendelssohn, however, felt free to innovate and develop a distinctive voice even in the face of Beethoven’s masterpieces.

The Talich Quartet’s artistry was evident from the opening moments of this piece. Their sound, in the quartet’s Adagio opening, was incredibly full and rich, even at low volume. Jan Talich’s first violin, brought to the fore in this piece, was simply ravishing.

This quartet’s members seem to know each other so intensely that they don’t even look at each other for cues; they seem to be parts of a single organism. Their style of performing is very subdued: they don’t move around much or make large, dramatic gestures. The drama is reserved for the music itself.

Next on the program, Musica Mundi for String Quartet by Benjamin Yusupov, was wildly different. It was written in 2008 for the Musica Mundi Festival in Brussels and was first performed there by the Talich Quartet. Yusupov, who is not only a composer but also a conductor and a concert pianist, writes music that brings the specific cultural identities of various ethnic groups into contact with Western musical practice, honoring the special rules and traditions of both sides.

A typical string quartet has three to five movements, but Musica Mundi is a continuous piece that, in Yusupov’s words, “tries to connect the influences of the most varied cultures.” The quartet combines “Armenian duduk, traditional Irish fiddle music, Indian raga, Gypsy-influenced Rumanian virtuoso instrumental music, as well as a song in the cimbalom style, all mixed with my original music.”

Many of us find it hard to listen to contemporary music because we don’t know what to expect. For example, if a concert features a Mozart string quartet, we have an idea of what it will sound like, even though we may not have heard that particular quartet before. If it is a familiar work, we can draw on our memories of other performances, including recordings we may have at home. With contemporary works, we’re on our own, which can be intimidating but can just as well be exciting, and even liberating.

The design of this piece put the audience at ease. Instead of worrying about whether or not they could understand the piece, listeners could sit back and see if they could pick out the various ethnicities portrayed or perhaps examine how the sounds of various instruments were produced. How would the sound of a sitar be made? What about the sound of the tambura, an Indian drone instrument, or the cimbalom, a Hungarian dulcimer?

This spirited piece called for very energetic playing and offered a number of technical challenges. Instruments were bowed, plucked, and even strummed. Weird dissonances, beautiful melodies, speedy runs, and percussive effects followed one another very quickly, keeping listeners guessing. At one point, a sudden break was followed by a quiet, melodic section, and then by a single, soft high note in the first violin. It was the end of the piece, as it turned out, and it took the audience by surprise — but it was a pleasant surprise.

The second half of the program included only one piece, Dimitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 14 in F sharp Major, op. 142. This was Shostakovich’s penultimate string quartet, composed in 1972-73, toward the end of his life. Shostakovich’s last years were marked by chronic health problems and the deaths of friends. His late quartets (numbers 12 through 15) were decidedly more melancholy and reflective.

The quartet’s basic structure is two animated, Allegretto movements surrounding an Adagio movement. The opening Allegretto is deceptively dancelike and humorous, given the piece’s later emotional course. Quite early on there is a set of repeated notes (the viola playing F-sharps over a simple cello melody); these notes will reappear, under various guises, at several important points, and make their last appearance just before the end of the piece. This device is only one of the ways in which Shostakovich subtly unifies the quartet.

The Adagio opens with a beautiful theme in D minor, first played by the violin and then taken up by the cello, evolving into a long, plangent, eloquent soliloquy (not a solo, however, since the other voices accompany the cello but never complete with it). The Adagio ends with a quiet passage that slides without interruption into the pizzicati of the second Allegretto movement, the finale. This movement begins with almost ghostly, ethereal sounds, and then moves into a passionate statement by the cello against the other three voices, another dancelike section, and lyrical effusiveness.

After a recurrence of the repeated F sharps in the cello, a beautiful Romantic-sounding melody marks a mood change to one of quiet meditation or perhaps resignation. The quartet is given a dying close, a single, sustained note in the cello. This is so unusual an ending that it took a moment for those in the audience unfamiliar with this quartet to understand that the piece was indeed over.

The Talich Quartet’s performance style is subdued and non-dramatic. The personality of individual performers or of the group as a whole is never stressed. Some people might find this style remote or cold, but one might also argue that they put themselves into the music.

The Talich Quartet is composed of amazing musicians — it would be unfair to single any one of them out, since prominence of one instrument or another may depend solely on the composer — who clearly have a strong ensemble identity.

It happens that, for example, first violin Talich and the cellist Petr Prause had particularly prominent parts in the Newtown concert that showcased their individual artistry. But the inner voices, second violin Petr Macecek and violist Vladimir Bucak a, were also stunning, and finally, the excellence of an ensemble is greater than the sum of its parts.