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Ives Quartet’s undeniable talent on display – The Buffalo News December 12, 2008

By Garaud MacTaggart
NEWS CONTRIBUTING REVIEWER

The Slee Beethoven Cycle is one of the great chamber music programs, mandating that every concert in the season contain one string quartet from each of the composer’s three “periods.”

Every year, each of the six concerts comprising the cycle is allotted a distinct trio of quartets for each of the programs.

Sometimes the series has featured the same ensemble running through a season’s worth of concerts and, at other times, two, three or four groups take turns tackling the programs. This year is one of those multiple group takes on the cycle with the Yings, the Lydian and, Friday night, the Ives String Quartet taking their turns.

Based upon their work Friday night, it is apparent that the Ives Quartet is an undeniably talented group of musicians.

One of the many peaks in Beethoven’s catalog belongs to the “Grosse Fuge,” op. 133, a massive, demanding piece that is almost symphonic in nature. It also happened to be the mandated centerpiece in the concert slated for the Ives String Quartet. The other works scheduled, the D major quartet from the composer’s op. 18 and the first of the three op. 59 “Rasumovsky” string quartets, also have their charms with the later named score being one of the most beguiling pieces in the cycle.

In the earliest work on the program, Beethoven opens up with a lovely, graceful tune that speeds up and gets more insistent and demanding within a fairly short period of time. It is a tricky thing to get right, to manage that transition between the seemingly lightweight to something

with more gravitas. Luckily the Ives String Quartet had the measure of the piece, literally from the get-go.

The “Grosse Fuge” was a little bit more challenging with dramatic pauses that sounded as if the composer was furiously constructing and deconstructing a monument, building a complex sonic sculpture more to be admired than loved.

The bracing-yet-approachable op. 59 quartet closed off the evening, and here the ensemble came through with considerable aplomb, matching the quality of insight that they brought to the earlier op. 18 quartet.