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Autumnal evening with the Ives Quartet – Stark Insider October 2, 2011

By Cy Ashley Webb

With leaves scudding across the parking lot, crickets chirping and a quarter moon low in the sky, autumn hung in the air on Friday, making one pause to take it in. This was a perfect evening to spend with the Ives Quartet, who performed at St. Marks’s Episcopal in Palo Alto. Even the churchy smell of the heavy wooden beams in the nave and chancel  combined with stale incense was perfect.

This was a particularly delicious program. Often I look at programming and wonder where particular choices came from. With the Ives Quartet, you can almost watch their programming build organically through the year. This  concert was no exception. Their first offering, Haydn’s Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 50, No. 3, built naturally on their September, 2010 and April, 2011 performances, which included  Op. 50 No. 1 and 2, respectively. The second offering, Erwin Schulhoff’s Quartet No. 1, was a completion of a performance begun at their September Salon. The third piece, Brahms Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 brought back a former guest, Gwendolyn Mok, and her 1868 Erard piano. These three pieces complemented each other, combining something light and decorative, with something of profound emotional intensity and something intellectually challenging.

Hearing the Schulhoff a second time in almost as many weeks was a rare treat.  I wrote at length about this piece last month, but never heard it live from beginning to end in a single performance. This breathtaking piece opens with an intense presto, punctuated by drone-like cello passages. The second movement highlights the enormous talents of violist Jodi Levitz.  I still haven’t figured out how the Ives Quartet produced the breathy tones that sounded all the world like a radio signal fading in and out – sounds that recur in the fourth movement. This piece of great violence and agitation plays like the audio sound track to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. The Aviv Quartet and Brandis Quartet versions of this piece – good as they are – don’t hold a candle to the Ives’ version, especially the fourth movement, with it’s eerily oscillating tones played by Susan Freier.

The star of the show was Gwendolyn Mok’s Erard piano. These words are not an incidental choice, as audience members clustered around the instrument after the show, some even having their picture taken with it.  Mok stoked everyone’s interest when she explained the Erard was single strung, instead of cross strung.  This difference eliminated some of the overtones that produce a more homogenous sound. Mok drove her point home, contrasting the Erard with a Yamaha grand that shared the stage. Homogenous tone aside, where the Yamaha had a bright tone, the Erard seemed both warmer and clearer.

Mok joined the Ives Quartet for the Brahms Quintet. The enormous contrast in timbre, volume and intensity that the Ives brought to this piece would sound altogether schizophrenic if performed by a lesser group. However, with the Ives Quartet, one marvels at the exquisite integration of piano with quartet, as the sound of one instrument melds into another, one musical gesture is completed by another, sounding at once consonant with each other, and then again, strikingly different. Nowhere is this more evident that the Scherzo, with its intense violence as piano and quartet work at cross-purposes with each other – and then pull together. The frantic, almost march-like scherzo relaxes into a trio – before returning to its original intensity. After this third movement, I was amazed that band members had the energy to continue.

The Ives Quartet will be repeating this program against on Sunday, October 9 at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose.

Ives Quartet offers Dvorák and Schulhoff – Stark Insider September 19, 2011

By Cy Ashley Webb

Being a music critic means contextualizing the music. This might come as a surprise for those who think it’s all about evaluation. While there’s obviously an element of opinion, that’s not the heart of the matter. In an ideal world, the critic leaves the reader a little bit smarter and more informed, by providing intelligent remarks about a performance that the reader might never see.

All of this is a long windup for the Ives Quartet Salon that took place this Sunday. These salons are all about context. By providing intelligent conversation about classical music for the reasonably educated layman, the Ives Quartet does something that no one else on the peninsula does. Scott Fogelsong’s pre-concert lectures come close, but they’re not quite the same thing. Interweaving performance and conversation, the Ives Quartet does a big favor for all of us, in scheduling these events.

I’d been listening to various versions of Dvorák’s “American” (String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96) and Edwin Schulhoff’s Quartets No. 1 and 2 for the better part of August and September in anticipation of this salon, so I thought I was reasonably prepared.  However, none of the works I’d been listening to prepared me for the breathtaking experience of sitting ten feet from violinist experience Bettina Mussumeli and hearing this stuff performed by the virtuoso Ives Quartet.  Hopefully, they’ll get around to recording these two pieces together. This sampling would have been enough, but Ives Quartet salon also included violist and musicologist Derek Katz. Teaching at UC Santa Barbara, Katz’ specialties include Czech music, nationalism and modernism, all of which speak directly to the program at hand.

The program highlighted the difference between the Czech Dvorák and German-Jew Schulhoff (also born in Czechoslovakia). Although separated by a mere 30 years, the yawning chasm of World War I places them eons apart. Much of this salon focused on how the classical aesthetic changed during this time, using Dvorák’s “American” and Schulhoff’s Quartet No. 1 as exemplars.

The Salon opened with the first moment of the “American,” Simultaneously fluid and supple, animated and pulsating, it was an entirely different experience than the Dvorák I’d been listening to. While reams have been written about the “American” influence on this work (for starters, see “Dvorák on the American Scene” by John Clapham in 19th-Century Music, (1981), Dvorák’s understanding of native American music was minimal, at best, and probably confounded with African-American spirituals. Immediately following the Dvorák, was the agitated first moment of Schulhoff’s first quartet. The difference, of course, is marked by World War I. Insofar as a nationalistic impulse informed the beauty of Dvorák, such an aesthetic died during the war years, clearing the way for the modernist tonality of Schulhoff. While the Dvorák was exquisitely beautiful, Schulhoff was writing from an entirely different place. His service in the war proved searing, as he came out of the experience firmly convinced that the war was, as Katz said, “a moral and political catastrophe,” that caused him to become briefly aligned with the dada movement. His focus  – which is hauntingly evident in his post-Dada work was how to write music that’s historically meaningful. This different aesthetic of modernity stands apart from the path taken Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Bartok, all of whom navigated similar waters.

The Ives Quartet and Katz continued through the second and third movements of the respective pieces, pausing to reflect on the similarities and differences between them. Dvorak’s take on ethnic music, was, as Stephen Harrison noted, a variation of Brahms with a sprinkling of “ethnic” tossed on top.

The most animated conversation was devoted to Schulhoff’s 4th movement, which stretches the technical abilities of players and instruments alike. Insofar as the catastrophe of World War I laid the ground work for the greater catastrophe of World War II, Schuloff’s aching viola train whistle and broken mechanistic end to this 1923 movement seems to foretell the disaster that would follow. His death in the Bavarian concentration camp of Wulzburg seems writ large over this piece.  Unlike Schoenberg and Bartok, both of whom ended up in the U.S. after the war, Schulhoff turned east, applying for Soviet citizenship before the war was over. He was arrested for being a Communist shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was severed, and died in the Bavarian camp of Wulzburg, along with his son.

In the brief Q & A that followed, someone asked the very smart question as to why no one had heard of Schulhoff until his recent revival. Harrison spoke to briefly to the politics of contemporary music that favored the cult of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. This was an interesting take  – that raised the tantalizing possibility that there might have been a tonal solution to the same very real issues faced by post-war composers.

The Ives Quartet will be revisiting the Schulhoff Quartet No. 1 in their September 30th and October 9th concerts. As always, they are worth following.

Side by Side by Side: a personal look at the Ives Quartet (pdf)

Side by Side by Side:
a personal look at the Ives Quartet (pdf)

With a hint of Spanish tunes, interspersed with chromatic passages from Freier and Mussumeli, I never knew that a string quartet could possibly sound this way. – Stark Insider February 28, 2011

By Cy Ashley Webb

Presenting a program that spans 250 years and moves fluidly from Mozart to a 1924 Rebecca Clarke work, the Ives Quartet cannot be easily pegged, except perhaps by their very nimbleness. This nimbleness was clearly at work when a last minute change in the ordering of the program changed how the audience felt at the end of intermission. By ending the first half with Mozart, instead of the more ambiguous Clark, the Quartet changed the experience of the concert, leaving the audience on terra firma.

I’m getting ahead of myself here, however. Friday’s performance opened with two separate pieces by Rebecca Clarke, a violist and composer primarily active in the first three decades of the last century.  Both of these pieces highlighted the considerable talents of violist Jodi Levitz. I was unfamiliar with Clarke – and subsequent forays out to iTunes were surprising as they revealed almost 100 entries – albeit none for theComodo et amabile (1924) that opened this performance. Although theComodo began with gentle wandering tones suggestive of Debussy, the music became increasing agitated, unified more by the pizzicato notes on Harrison’s cello and recurrent motives rather than any melody line. This music deserves a serious listen, which why I was disheartened that this particular piece was missing from iTunes because I’d love to hear it again as I’m sure I missed much of the complexity the work. The second piece,Adagio, was similar in tone to the first. Program notes likened this work to that of Bloch. Harrison’s cello drone halfway through was wonderfully startling.

Mozart’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, K 458, dubbed the “Hunt” followed.  The brilliantly articulated trill, tossed back and forth between the players, made the first movement just plain fun as it wound itself way between the trill and a second melody line. Unlike the Clarke pieces, which were tended toward vertical organization, this was more accessible. This playful snippet burst forth again in the fourth Allegro assai movement, which offered up a new degree of complexity. So much is happening here that one marvels because the string quartet was a relatively new phenomena when this was written.  It was a wonder how the quartet could possibly sustain the energy and joy that went into this piece.  The audience was energized and awestruck when this piece drew to a rollicking conclusion.

A brief intermission was followed by Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major (1903). Detailed program notes helped audience members make sense of the sonata form of the first and fourth movements.  More than anything, I was struck by what a privilege it is to hear this music live. I struggled to follow each musician separately, but they sounded so good together, this was quite impossible.  The first movement came to an exquisitely gentle end.  With a rapid pizzicato attack by all four players, the second movement got off to a startling beginning. With hint of Spanish tunes, interspersed with chromatic passages from Freier and Mussumeli, I never knew a string quartet could possibly sound this way. The fourth movement began frenetically, only to dissipate, and build to an astonishing end.

Once again I’m struck by how very fortunate we are to have the Ives Quartet at the south end of the Peninsula.  With a magic all their own, this quartet plays with a precision, cleanness and élan that we often reserve for well established groups.  They may just be the best-kept secret on the South Bay classical scene.

With a hint of Spanish tunes, interspersed with chromatic passages from Freier and Mussumeli, I never knew that a string quartet could possibly sound this way. – Stark Insider February 28, 2011

By Cy Ashley Webb

Presenting a program that spans 250 years and moves fluidly from Mozart to a 1924 Rebecca Clarke work, the Ives Quartet cannot be easily pegged, except perhaps by their very nimbleness. This nimbleness was clearly at work when a last minute change in the ordering of the program changed how the audience felt at the end of intermission. By ending the first half with Mozart, instead of the more ambiguous Clark, the Quartet changed the experience of the concert, leaving the audience on terra firma.

I’m getting ahead of myself here, however. Friday’s performance opened with two separate pieces by Rebecca Clarke, a violist and composer primarily active in the first three decades of the last century.  Both of these pieces highlighted the considerable talents of violist Jodi Levitz. I was unfamiliar with Clarke – and subsequent forays out to iTunes were surprising as they revealed almost 100 entries – albeit none for theComodo et amabile (1924) that opened this performance. Although theComodo began with gentle wandering tones suggestive of Debussy, the music became increasing agitated, unified more by the pizzicato notes on Harrison’s cello and recurrent motives rather than any melody line. This music deserves a serious listen, which why I was disheartened that this particular piece was missing from iTunes because I’d love to hear it again as I’m sure I missed much of the complexity the work. The second piece,Adagio, was similar in tone to the first. Program notes likened this work to that of Bloch. Harrison’s cello drone halfway through was wonderfully startling.

Mozart’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, K 458, dubbed the “Hunt” followed.  The brilliantly articulated trill, tossed back and forth between the players, made the first movement just plain fun as it wound itself way between the trill and a second melody line. Unlike the Clarke pieces, which were tended toward vertical organization, this was more accessible. This playful snippet burst forth again in the fourth Allegro assai movement, which offered up a new degree of complexity. So much is happening here that one marvels because the string quartet was a relatively new phenomena when this was written.  It was a wonder how the quartet could possibly sustain the energy and joy that went into this piece.  The audience was energized and awestruck when this piece drew to a rollicking conclusion.

A brief intermission was followed by Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major (1903). Detailed program notes helped audience members make sense of the sonata form of the first and fourth movements.  More than anything, I was struck by what a privilege it is to hear this music live. I struggled to follow each musician separately, but they sounded so good together, this was quite impossible.  The first movement came to an exquisitely gentle end.  With a rapid pizzicato attack by all four players, the second movement got off to a startling beginning. With hint of Spanish tunes, interspersed with chromatic passages from Freier and Mussumeli, I never knew a string quartet could possibly sound this way. The fourth movement began frenetically, only to dissipate, and build to an astonishing end.

Once again I’m struck by how very fortunate we are to have the Ives Quartet at the south end of the Peninsula.  With a magic all their own, this quartet plays with a precision, cleanness and élan that we often reserve for well established groups.  They may just be the best-kept secret on the South Bay classical scene.

If playing vibrato is not an authentic option for today’s performers, the question arises, ‘what is a musician to do when faced with the need for volume.’ – Stark Insider November 17, 2010

By Cy Ashley Webb

The last time I spoke to Susan Freier of the Ives Quartet, she began to explain how bowing techniques differ for baroque music. This began a thread that followed me through my recent review of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and continued as I read John Marchese’s gem of a book, The Violin Maker. Not being a string player, I’m always open to learning about anything that helps me listen more critically, and conversations with Freier opened a small window into that process.

This conversation reached full throttle during the first salon of the Ives Quartet season last Sunday during which Bettina Mussumeli, Jodi Levitz, Stephen Harrison and Susan Freier spoke at length about Haydn’s Opus 50. Rather than deconstruct the composition, members of the quartet addressed differences in how this piece was played twenty years ago vs how it is played today. When Stephen Harrison opened the conversation noting that twenty years ago, sustain was king, and students were urged to play with a continuous vibrato like Jascha Heifetz, I positively began to quiver because I’d just been listening to Joshua Bell comment on what you do when you stop playing vibrato.

Most people recognize vibrato when they hear it. The term is used to describe pulsating variation in pitch when playing or singing. A deep throaty opera singer usually employs vibrato while singing, as do most string instruments. It’s so easy to confuse vibrato with tremulo (pulsating changes in volume) that the terms are often used interchangeably. The reason for this confusion became apparent as Harrison pointed out that twenty years ago, the message was to play LOUD. However, when string players boost their volume by playing vibrato, they are not necessarily playing the way the music was originally envisioned.

Volume and vibrato become an issue for musicians because conditions today are far more demanding than when this music was originally written. Freier noted that when the quartet is on tour in Europe, they tend to play small venues with lots of marble that reflect the sounds, rather than large heavily carpeted and curtained venues that just eat up them up. The acoustics of these venues are more consistent with what this music was written for.

If playing vibrato is not an authentic option for today’s performers, the question arises what a musician is to do when faced with the need for volume. Mussumeli provided a partial answer to this as she distinguished between old instruments with modern setups and modern instruments with old setups. By changing strings from gut to titanium, allowing more pressure at the bridge and varying the fingerboard, one ultimately arrives at a more authentic (albeit less resonant) sound in a modern venue. Mussumeli’s observations reminded me of Sam Zygumtowicz’s line in The Violin Maker. Commenting on instruments made by Stradivarius and Guarneri, he says “It’s like those old American cars in Cuba that were there before Castro, and are still running. They’re classic Chevy’s or Fords, but chances are that most of the parts are different.” It’s only through what Mussumeli termed a “modern set up” that we use these instruments today. She continued her discussion by presenting variations in the evolution of the bow. I confess, I got lost here as Mussulemi presented so many bows in rapid succession that I was unable to follow her completely.

In addition to technique and instrumentation, Jodi Levitz pointed out that notation also stands in our way of getting at a truly authentic performance. My ears perked up here, because I’d recently listened to composer Erik Ulman explain that not every note was written down in baroque music as originally published. In many instances, the sheet music we’ve grown up with is an educated person’s best guess and can be easily trumped by subsequent scholarship. As Levitz noted, we’re textualists – and what is written becomes what is true. When one of the musicians explained that most sheet music contains suggestions for ornamentation, my mind flashed to the first five pages of Bach’s Selections from Anna Magdalena’s Notebook languishing on my piano – pages that detail suggested ornaments and when they can be omitted. Much to the delight of the audience, the group played the identical piece with different ornaments.

The Ives Quartet will be presenting a second Salon in April. If the excellent discussion that took place Sunday is any indication, this second Salon should be equally inspiring.

If playing vibrato is not an authentic option for today’s performers, the question arises, 'what is a musician to do when faced with the need for volume.' – Stark Insider November 17, 2010

By Cy Ashley Webb

The last time I spoke to Susan Freier of the Ives Quartet, she began to explain how bowing techniques differ for baroque music. This began a thread that followed me through my recent review of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and continued as I read John Marchese’s gem of a book, The Violin Maker. Not being a string player, I’m always open to learning about anything that helps me listen more critically, and conversations with Freier opened a small window into that process.

This conversation reached full throttle during the first salon of the Ives Quartet season last Sunday during which Bettina Mussumeli, Jodi Levitz, Stephen Harrison and Susan Freier spoke at length about Haydn’s Opus 50. Rather than deconstruct the composition, members of the quartet addressed differences in how this piece was played twenty years ago vs how it is played today. When Stephen Harrison opened the conversation noting that twenty years ago, sustain was king, and students were urged to play with a continuous vibrato like Jascha Heifetz, I positively began to quiver because I’d just been listening to Joshua Bell comment on what you do when you stop playing vibrato.

Most people recognize vibrato when they hear it. The term is used to describe pulsating variation in pitch when playing or singing. A deep throaty opera singer usually employs vibrato while singing, as do most string instruments. It’s so easy to confuse vibrato with tremulo (pulsating changes in volume) that the terms are often used interchangeably. The reason for this confusion became apparent as Harrison pointed out that twenty years ago, the message was to play LOUD. However, when string players boost their volume by playing vibrato, they are not necessarily playing the way the music was originally envisioned.

Volume and vibrato become an issue for musicians because conditions today are far more demanding than when this music was originally written. Freier noted that when the quartet is on tour in Europe, they tend to play small venues with lots of marble that reflect the sounds, rather than large heavily carpeted and curtained venues that just eat up them up. The acoustics of these venues are more consistent with what this music was written for.

If playing vibrato is not an authentic option for today’s performers, the question arises what a musician is to do when faced with the need for volume. Mussumeli provided a partial answer to this as she distinguished between old instruments with modern setups and modern instruments with old setups. By changing strings from gut to titanium, allowing more pressure at the bridge and varying the fingerboard, one ultimately arrives at a more authentic (albeit less resonant) sound in a modern venue. Mussumeli’s observations reminded me of Sam Zygumtowicz’s line in The Violin Maker. Commenting on instruments made by Stradivarius and Guarneri, he says “It’s like those old American cars in Cuba that were there before Castro, and are still running. They’re classic Chevy’s or Fords, but chances are that most of the parts are different.” It’s only through what Mussumeli termed a “modern set up” that we use these instruments today. She continued her discussion by presenting variations in the evolution of the bow. I confess, I got lost here as Mussulemi presented so many bows in rapid succession that I was unable to follow her completely.

In addition to technique and instrumentation, Jodi Levitz pointed out that notation also stands in our way of getting at a truly authentic performance. My ears perked up here, because I’d recently listened to composer Erik Ulman explain that not every note was written down in baroque music as originally published. In many instances, the sheet music we’ve grown up with is an educated person’s best guess and can be easily trumped by subsequent scholarship. As Levitz noted, we’re textualists – and what is written becomes what is true. When one of the musicians explained that most sheet music contains suggestions for ornamentation, my mind flashed to the first five pages of Bach’s Selections from Anna Magdalena’s Notebook languishing on my piano – pages that detail suggested ornaments and when they can be omitted. Much to the delight of the audience, the group played the identical piece with different ornaments.

The Ives Quartet will be presenting a second Salon in April. If the excellent discussion that took place Sunday is any indication, this second Salon should be equally inspiring.

Rudhyar in Retrospect 3: The Other Minds Concerts – Civic Center Blog October 2, 2010

By SFMIKE

In the early 1970s, Rudhyar moved from Southern to Northern California. Charles Amirkhanian (above) was Music Director of KPFA-FM in Berkeley from 1969-1992, presiding over a golden age of local public radio, and in the early 1970s he devoted a number of broadcasts to Rudhyar’s music and interviews with the composer. (You can listen to highlights at the RadiOM website by clicking here.) Listening to Rudhyar and Amirkhanian in a 1972 interview is a treat, especially hearing evidence that Rudhyar had left everything behind in the Old World except a thick French accent. It’s also fascinating listening to a young Amirkhanian, whose entire life has been devoted to being a “seed-man” in the world of music. Not long after these interviews, Rudhyar embarked on another spurt of composing for the last ten years of his life, this time accompanied by grants, performances, and honors.

For the 25th anniversary of Rudhyar’s death, Amirkhanian’s Other Minds Music organization produced a concert of Rudhyar’s music from both the 1920s and the 1970s in the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco last Monday.

The small church turned out to be jammed to the gills for the performance, so I turned in my press ticket and promised to make it down the Peninsula on Wednesday evening for an encore performance in the Palo Alto suburb of Portola Valley.

Rudhyar’s music from the 1920s and 1970s sounds remarkably similar, an attractively difficult mix of dissonance and beauty, with Scriabin as a model but sounding more like Charles Ives and Henry Cowell.

It also looks fiendishly difficult to play, particularly in its complicated counting. I asked Sarah Cahill if there were any special difficulties, and she replied in an email:

“Sometimes he writes about how he wants to convey the rhythms of non-verbal speech through music, so he never gives you a steady beat, but instead the music is always fluctuating and evolving through the kind of irregular rhythms we use in speech. For instance, in “Granites,” if you look at the first page of the score, you’ll notice there’s no time signature. You’ll also notice that he has measures with “3” over large brackets, entire phrases (meaning it’s one huge triplet), and then sixteenth-note triplets within that and also groups of two and four sixteenth notes. That’s difficult to play if you’re counting precisely. But I don’t think Rudhyar is like Elliott Carter, a composer who really demands a strict internal metronome. Both Leyla [his widow] and Deniz [an academic who’s just written a biography], who guided me a bit in these performances, stressed that you have to feel it even more than counting strictly. But then, that “feeling” brings up another challenge: you’ll see in the program notes for Transmutation that Rudhyar has a real plan for that set of seven pieces, and there has to be a real psychic transformation through the entire sequence. That is probably even more of a challenge than Rudhyar’s rhythmic writing.”

Valley Presbyterian Church in Portola Valley was spacious and fairly empty after the sold-out Swedenborgian performance, and the lighting of the trees behind the glass-backed altar by Allen Wilner was superb.

So were all the performers, including Julie Steinberg, piano and David Abel, violin who played the opening “Poem for Violin and Piano” from 1920.

Sarah Cahill played the 1976 “Transmutation, tone sequence in seven moments” which had premiered in nearby Palo Alto. After intermission, she returned to the 1920s with “Stars from Pentagram No. 3” and “Granites.” She seems to understand this kind of music as well as anyone in the world, and they were wonderful performances (click here for a Kosman review at SFGate confirming the impression).

The finale was his Second String Quartet from 1979 which was commissioned by the recently deceased Betty Freeman. The Ives Quartet gave a great performance.

Other Minds Festival on Rudhyar – San Francico Chronicle September 29, 2010

By Joshua Kosman

The world of 20th century music is replete with hidden treasures, and the Other Minds Festival unearthed one on Monday night with a splendid concert devoted to the music of the little-known modernist composer Dane Rudhyar.

Rudhyar was born in Paris in 1895, came to the United States at 21, and died in San Francisco in 1985 at age 90. In addition to his music, which is both craggy and intoxicating, he devoted himself to painting, literature and an obfuscating mix of spiritualism and astrology.

The music on Monday’s program at the Swedenborgian Church in Pacific Heights was drawn from both of Rudhyar’s periods of composition – the 1920s, when he blended the influences of Debussy and Scriabin with an acerbic and distinctively American tone, and the 1970s, when he returned to music after several decades away from it.

Both groups revealed a creative voice at once pungent and inviting, muscular and unpredictable. Two short piano pieces from the 1920s, “Stars” from “Pentagram No. 3” and “Granites,” found beauty in wiry dissonance and a rhapsodic surface; both of them sounded lean and incisive in a magnificent rendition by pianist Sarah Cahill. The first of three “Poems for Violin and Piano,” from 1920 – similarly willful and arresting – began the evening in a forthright performance by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg.

When Rudhyar took up composition again in the 1970s, his stylistic palette had expanded to include strains of popular music and more overt invocations of late Romanticism alongside the dissonant modernism of Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell.

The evening’s high point was Cahill’s gorgeous and rhetorically subtle rendition of “Transmutation,” a suite of seven piano movements that touch on a wide range of stylistic bases – from cocktail-lounge music to Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata. Some of the pieces are oddly seductive, others pugnacious and brusque, yet all of them feel deeply connected despite their superficial dissimilarities.

Something similar is at work in “Crisis and Overcoming,” a four-movement string quartet written in 1979 for the Kronos Quartet. Here Rudhyar writes instrumental conversations that sound fugal without actually repeating, and he closes with a little double homage to Ravel and Gershwin. The Ives Quartet (violinists Bettina Mussumeli and Susan Freier, violist Jodi Levitz and cellist Stephen Harrison) played it wonderfully.

This music engages the brain and soul and leaves you in a very different place than when you walked in the room. – Stark Insider September 28, 2010

By Cy Ashley Webb

String quartets are great to drive to, great to clean the house to, great to groom the dog to. There’ve even better deliciously wafting up to the second floor of the Isabelle Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston when you’re wandering around looking at artwork. However, most are not the best to actually sit down and listen to.

The Ives Quartet is different. In a world of many darn good string quartets, there aren’t many that play with their passion and intensity. Composed of two violins (Bettina Mussumeli and Susan Freier), a viola (Jodi Levitz) and a cello (Stephen Harrison), the Ives Quartet puts this music back on the map. This is not your mother’s string quartet playing lovely, lyrical, forgettable period music. This music engages the brain and soul and leaves you in a very different place than when you walked in the room.

One of thing things I really appreciated was the effort that individual members made to actually explain the music before they played it. The group opened with Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, No. 1. This marks the beginning of a venture in which the group will play all of the works in this series. Jodi Levitz’s remarks about this being a “very Haydn” piece and her anecdotal material about Haydn publishing this with three different publishers warmed the audience to a lovely, lovely piece. This was immediately followed by Dane Rudhyar’s String Quartet No. 2, Crisis and Overcoming.

The Rudhyar piece was an ambitious undertaking. I’d read a fair amount of Rudhyar – and was painfully familiar with his dense, overwrought style that forced the reader to go through 20 pages before coming to yet another Rudhyar gem of insight. I was stunned to learn he was a musician – and even more stunned to learn he’d lived in Palo Alto. I’m grateful to the Ives Quartet for taking on this work. Before picking up his bow, Stephen Harrison let the audience know that while one of Rudhyar’s aims was to avoid the very intellectual approach of Schoenberg, this piece sounded very much like Schoenberg. Harrison’s analysis was spot on. Indeed, I found this piece, not unlike much of Rudhyar’s writing – aimless wandering, except for the bits that make you sit up. Like much of Rudhyar’s writing, I wish this piece could have been condensed to something substantially shorter. This is not a criticism of the Ives quarter or their choice of this music. I came away there knowing more about Rudhyar than I did coming in – and have a whole new appreciation for his influence on John Cage and Lou Harrison. This alone would have been worth the price of admission.

If the first half of the concert fed one’s mind, the second half went straight to the spirit. Pianist Gwendolyn Mok joined the group for Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44. Whereas the first Haydn piece left no doubt as to the virtuosity of this group, this piece left no doubt as to their intensity. Playing in equal measure, neither the group nor Ms. Mok dominated the work. Engaging the audience, the this piece held the audience’s attention in a rare laser-like focus. Leaving Le Petit Trianon, all I could think of was the name of one of the groups’ concerts in a previous year – “plays well together.” Indeed, they do.

The Ives Quartet will be returning in November for a fall salon, and again in February at locations in Palo Alto and San Jose. They are worth checking out – especially if you want your mind changed about how dynamic string quartets can be.