Ives Quartet opens season with inventive, adventurous program – Mercury News Friday, October 17, 2008

By Richard Scheinin

Jazz saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk used to joke that his group didn’t get enough gigs in New York, his home base, because club owners took him for granted. “Oh, you’re that local band,” they would tell him, time and again, he said, with a laugh that betrayed more than a little frustration.

You have to wonder if the Ives Quartet, a superb Bay Area-based chamber group, has something of the same problem as the late Kirk. Entering its 10th season, the Ives doesn’t have the high profile it deserves around the bay, even though its performances tend to be imaginative, passionate, refined — every bit as enjoyable and rewarding, in other words, as those by better-known string quartets.

If you’ve never seen them, do yourself a favor and attend one of their season-opening concerts, happening tonight in San Jose and Friday in Palo Alto. As usual, the group — violinists Bettina Mussumeli and Susan Freier, violist Jodi Levitz and cellist Stephen Harrison — has put together the sort of out-of-the-box program you’re unlikely to hear from most other quartets.

It’s an all-American program, featuring George Gershwin’s “Lullabye” (he later culled the tune “Has Anyone Seen My Joe?” from it); Charles Ives’s thorny and wondrous String Quartet No. 2; and Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, a darkly Romantic work by the New Englander whose music was widely performed a century ago. Leave it to the Ives (joined by pianist William Wellborn for the quintet) to arrange her Bay Area comeback.

Back in 2006, here’s what I had to say about an Ives program of Mozart, Beethoven and Leo Ornstein, another now-overlooked composer who, in his time, was a superstar pianist likened to Rachmaninoff:

The Ives “performed with a super-refinement that kept breaking out into a visceral, almost rock ‘n’ roll intensity.”

Ornstein’s Quintet for Piano and Strings (performed with pianist Janice Weber) “was panoramic: You could practically see the Russian steppes moving past, as if through the windows of a train. The performance was also brutally emotional, alive with arching, cantorial melodies set in unison for strings over the galloping, arpeggiating piano. All was in constant motion, propelled by big gestures: long-noted themes, obsessively explored; Stravinsky-esque rhythms; dashes of New York’s Jazz Age hustle and bustle.”

Curious yet? Read more about the group at www.ivescollective.org.

And go see the Ives Quartet at 7 tonight at Le Petit Trianon, 72 N. Fifth St., San Jose; or 8 p.m. Friday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Ave., Palo Alto. Tickets: $25 general, $20 seniors, $15 students, free ages 12 and younger. Buy tickets at the door, or make a reservation at (650) 224-7849.

Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5069.