Quartet’s approach a breath of fresh air

by David Gordon Duke

Borealis String Quartet
With Sara Davis Buechner, piano
UBC School of Music Recital Hall, Jan. 14

Last week New York’s veteran Emerson Quartet presented a programme designed, in part, to refresh the chamber repertoire by showcasing new repertoire. On Friday at UBC Vancouver’s own Borealis String Quartet presented two recently composed works by BC composers Imant Raminsh and Stephen Chatman.

Okanagan-based Raminsh is a maverick doggedly exploring dated styles and forms; at its best his work has a radiant lyricism. His first Quartet — a solemn work with little string interest beyond the over-use of mutes — stubbornly rejects every progressive development made in quartet writing during the last 80 years. Light on content, if long on sincerity, it’s an exasperating blend of passion and willful naivete.

UBC’s new pianist Sara Davis Buechner joined the quartet for Chatman’s Lawren S. Harris Suite, three vignettes suggested by works of the great Group of Seven painter who lived in Vancouver during the middle decades of the last century. Isolation Peak launches the set, layering fourth-based sonorities; Frolic (Abstraction 30) is a rhythmically sophisticated scherzo-cum-moto perpetuo. The Spirit Settling into the Heaven World State evokes Harris’s theosophical leanings: a sentimental quote from Rossini’s Stabat Mater is veiled with extended effects; ethereal artificial harmonics and notes plucked inside the piano create a shifting counterpoint of textures.

The second half of the programme was Ravel’s voluptuous masterpiece, his 1903 String Quartet — both a reflection of the extravagant luxe of the turn of the century and a lexicon of exactingly defined string effects. The Borealis players (with guest cellist Ariel Barnes filling in for regular Joel Stobbe) couldn’t have made a better choice to showcase their fastidious approach to colour and balance. If their overall conception emphasized the work’s dramatic side, their interpretation was always clean and convincing, and their especially brisk finale was as clear and frosty as the winter evening.

Vancouver Sun
18 January 2005

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