Monday, March 13, 2006

A Young Quartet Whose Moment Has Arrived
 
By Fred Kirshnit

In the West, Sergei Prokofiev is best known for his ballets, piano music, and symphonies — well, actually he is best known for “Peter and the Wolf” — while in Russia he is equally revered as a great composer for the operatic stage. He is not known for chamber music, but he wrote a few pieces of note, including one that premiered right here in the United States.

The String Quartet No.1 was commissioned by the Library of Congress and first performed in Washington in 1931, while Prokofiev was touring as a pianist in America, Canada, and Cuba (this was before he made the disastrous decision to return to the sheltering arms of Uncle Joe Stalin). Immediately thereafter, apparently, it was consigned to one of their dustiest and most inaccessible shelves —revivals have been virtually nonexistent. But Prokofiev was so enamored of its Andante that he twice tried to resurrect it, first in a piano version that became part of his Six Pieces, Op. 52, and then in a siring-orchestra arrangement that he never actually published.

On Thursday evening at the Rose Studio, the Daedalus Quartet, under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, presented the work in its original form. This fine group — Kyu-Young Kim and Mm-Young Kim, violins; Jessica Thompson, viola; and Raman Ramakrishnan, cello — caught the spirit of the enfant terrible right from the outset.

Prokofiev did not infuse his pieces with jazz like his contemporary Ravel, but he did adopt the kicky rhythms of the idiom in the late 1920s and early ’30s. The ensemble this evening was brash in the opening Allegro, reminding of the performing style of the composer himself in those few recordings extant of his piano concertos.

The quartet produces a very well-blended sound, and the Kims, who alternated as first violins, have superb tone. In the Andante molto — Vivace, Prokofiev experiments with legato bowing in the violins and pizzicato in the two lower instruments. Mr. Ramakrishnan complimented his burnished tone with strong-handed plucking; this was almost exaggerated in spots, but highly effective. The group also emphasized the wild dissonance of the movement, the composer’s thumbing of his nose at what he perceived as the bourgeois musical establishment of the time (he soon would become its most eloquent spokesman, although most likely under duress).

That beautiful Andante was thought out impressively by the Daedalus foursome. They built a labyrinth of sound out of the most delicate of materials. Overall, this was splendid music-making, made all the more pleasurable by the intimate setting of the studio.

The next piece reminded me of my mother-in-law, who refused to attend chamber music concerts on the pretext that they reminded her of the music in a hotel lobby. The quartet dredged up a piece of flotsam from the stagnant Mendelssohn pond, the String Quartet No. 3 in D major. Do you know this piece? Of course not, but you have still heard it all before.

Mendelssohn is most important in music history for his role as an interpreter and discoverer of great music, his founding of the orchestra in Leipzig, and his championing of the concept of a “classical” music. Yes, Felix wrote some beautiful music, but the bulk of his writing for piano and for chamber ensembles is just puffed-up fluff.

These dedicated musicians gave the piece a fabulous performance, though I kept waiting for melodic inspiration that simply never came. It was difficult not to like this performance a lot: It was infectiously buoyant and exuberant. For young musicians, the journey matters, not the arrival. Now, at just the right age, these people have arrived.