Reveling in the Unfamiliar – San Francisco Classical Voice www.sfcv.org February 6, 2004

By Michelle Dulak

The way of the typical string quartet is to stick to the core 18th and 19th-century repertoire, varying it once in a while with either a newly-commissioned work or a well-known piece form the last century. It’s an unusual ensemble that takes the trouble to root around and unearth something both genuinely unknown and interesting, as the Ives Quartet did Friday night at Berkeley’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church.

Albert Sammons is known (to those of us who have heard of him at all) mainly as the violinist who first recorded Elgar’s Violin Concerto and several of Elgar’s chamber works. I think I had heard him referred to once or twice as “the English Kreisler,” and had a dim idea that he’d written some little character pieces for violin and piano in the Kreisler manner. Certainly I had no idea that he’d written anything as ambitious as the B-major “Phantasy Quartet” the Ives Quartet played. (The title has to do with the occasion for the composition: W. W. Cobbett established a competition, early in the 20th century, for pieces to be modeled loosely on the 17th-century English “phantasy” which is why there are so many “phantasies” in English chamber music in the first couple decades of the 20th century. Sammons’ quartet won the prize in 1915.)

It’s eight minutes of fascinating, bewildering music. There are hints of the Ravel and Debussy quartets in the opening (the Ravel for design, the Debussy for texture), but the harmony is more advanced than either – more like early Webern or, especially, early Schoenberg. In fact, once the piece gets going it sounds like nothing so much as a scaled-down, abbreviated Schoenberg Pelleas. It starts in B major (sort of), and ends in B major (most definitely), but in between it wanders far and freely, going to all sorts of unexpected places, including even the odd unadulterated major triad. I wouldn’t call it exactly a lovable piece, but it was intensely interesting.

The rest of the program highlighted the Ives’ balancing of the comfortable and the unfamiliar. It opened with Beethoven’s Op. 18/5, in a lithe and witty performance in which first violinist Robin Sharp’s deft playing seemed to set the tone. And it ended with Borodin’s beautiful and neglected First Quartet. I have never understood why this quartet is hardly played while the Second is everywhere. (Well, of course I know why – the reasons include some luscious cello tunes, and Kismet – but I still think it’s unfair). The Ives performance was brilliant and accomplished; the many effects involving harmonics (especially in the Scherzo’s astonishing trio section, but also at the end of the first movement, the beginning of the last, and elsewhere) were eerily perfect. But above all it was an affectionateperformance, of an affectionate piece. Sharp’s graceful, leisurely, playful account of the first movement’s main theme – the one Borodin borrowed from the “second” finale of Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet – made me reflect again on how different the things were that Borodin and Beethoven had made of the same sequence of notes.

The quartet titled this concert “Les Vendredis,” after the Friday soirees at which the “Mighty Handful” of Russian composers (and some less “mighty” as well) gathered to play and hear pieces for string quartets. Maybe we hope for more of their music from the Ives? Maybe the Glazunov Vovelettes, or Borodin’s wonderful 5/8 Scherzo?

(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music American, and the New York Times.)