Eclectic but
intelligent program

Emerson Quartet a reliable favourite
for Friends of Chamber Music

by David Gordon Duke

Emerson Quartet
Friends of Chamber Music
Vancouver Playhouse, Jan. 11

The Emerson String Quartet has proved a reliable favourite for the Friends of Chamber Music over many seasons. This year’s programme stretched boundaries in an unusual pairing of anchor works by Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, interspersed with one-movement works by Spanish impressionist Joaquin Turina and contemporary American Joan Tower.

The Emerson is in the midst of a Mendelssohn cycle at Carnegie Hall, to be repeated later this year in London. Opus 12, written when the composer was 20, brings out the Quartet’s finesse and ensemble, especially in the Canzonetta,with its echos of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and classic Mendelssohn nervous lightness and delicacy.

Turina’s La oración del torero (The Oration of the Bullfighter) is loosely constructed but colourful; a welcome novelty and a reminder of the far-reaching influence of Debussy’s single, revolutionary string quartet. Joan Tower’s music has no pronounced originality, her idiom deriving as much from Bartók as Turina from Debussy. Even so her Incandescence is a taut and logical work, spectacularly conceived for the Quartet, and brought to life by appropriately incandescent and rhythmically vibrant playing.

Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets can now be considered Vancouver staples. The Second, from 1944, is an homage to, or perhaps a threnody for, Russian traditions. The Emerson’s combination of focus and intensity made the extraordinary second movement, Recitative and Romance, in which soliloquies for solo first violin flank a nostalgic and melancholy adagio, profound and memorable. Subsequent movements play out intrinsically Russian moods — a edgy waltz and a set of variations — before the coda returns to the enigmatic recitative.

Encores often add little to programmes, but on Tuesday a fugue written by a young Mendelssohn and a excerpt from Bach’s Art of Fugue emphasized the subtle connecting threads of an eclectic but intelligent programme.

Vancouver Sun
14 January 2005

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