Good Humor on The River

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The New York Sun

It’s summer and a good time to expand my horizons, so I tried very hard to appreciate last Sunday afternoon’s concert at Bargemusic, the best little floating crap game in New York, in which virtually every aesthetic decision ran counter to my own personal tastes.

A relatively young group of players, who recently banded together to establish a music festival in Minnesota, performed a quartet of quartets, including the work of Phillip Glass and Bela Bartok. The two violinists, Colin Jacobsen and Jonathan Gandelsman, alternated chairs as part of an unusual seating arrangement with violist Nicholas Cords directly to the left of the first violin and cellist Eric Jacobsen in the usual position. This left the two violins facing each other — the standard antiphonal platform devise in an orchestra, but rare for a small band. The result was a clearer sense of the inner voice of the second fiddle, although sometimes at the expense of his violist colleague. The technical capabilities of these gentlemen could not be gainsaid, even if their approach to all four works proved decidedly challenging.

They began with Haydn, specifically the Quartet in C major, Op. 54, No. 2. Mr. Jacobsen as first violinist encountered some difficulty settling, but once over this initial messiness, the performance as a whole was precise and accurate. The foursome, however, evidently took an oath to employ no vibrato whatsoever.Certainly one can make a strong case for this type of articulation, but the result is rather cold, desiccated music-making. The faster movements emerged relatively unharmed by this asceticism, but the normally throbbing Adagio, filled with yearnings and longings rarely expressed so emotionally in the Age of Enlightenment, left me wanting.

Except for the third quartet of Arnold Schoenberg, my own personal favorite 20th-century effort in the genre is Bela Bartok’s second. Hearing it at the barge, with its intimate acoustics and up-close and personal seating, allowed me to feel as if I were a part of the piece itself. In the outer movements, the participants relaxed their vibrato-verboten policy just a tad and produced some stunning playing, expertly blended and filled with heartfelt modernisms. However, I was quite surprised by the realization of the middle Allegro molto, capriccioso. I expected the young musicians to really dig into Bartok’s wild and frenzied Gypsy rhythms and offer a swirling, frightening glimpse into the outlaw world that is this music’s genesis. Instead, they produced a reasonably accurate but inordinately gingerly traversal, working so hard on their coordination that they forgot about the music itself.

After intermission came Glass’s String Quartet No. 3, the score for the film “Mishima,” written originally for the old incarnation of the Kronos Quartet. The piece has six sections; I know this because the players stopped five times to shuffle through their printed music and realign themse lves in their chairs. Without this disruption, however, it might have been very difficult to notice the transitions between scenes because the essay as a whole is simply one vacuous figure intoned over and over again, ad nauseam. Perhaps cinematic images made all of this intelligible on film, but I fear that to fully appreciate this type of sound construction as an independent entity requires some, well, chemical supplements.

For those who care about such matters, the group pointed out programmatic coherence: the use of Gypsy themes in the Haydn, the ethnomusicological bent of Mr. Glass’s use of the Bartok as a link between Haydn and himse lf, and the dedication of the final Mozart work to Haydn.

With Mr. Gandelsman in the first chair, the concert ended with the Mozart E-flat major, K. 428. Perhaps I was prepared by the Haydn or just welcomed the contrast to the Glass, but this vibratoless presentation seemed a bit more emotional. Good humor abounded in the Allegro and solid musicianship went a long way to counteract some of the dulling effects of this polemical approach. But even if the music sounded a little constrained, the environment supplied compensation. The natural rhythms of the East River provided a good deal of motion and visceral bodily excitement. And if the concert sometimes seemed a bit tepid, one could always luxuriate in the spectacular view of Lower Manhattan.


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