Quartet gives passion to every synchronized note
By Ruth O. Bingham
The Honolulu Chamber Music Series is opening its 49th season with a double feature: the Emerson String Quartet playing two different programs on consecutive nights.
• 7:30 tonight • Orvis Auditorium, University of Hawai'i-Manoa • Preceded by a free meet-the-artists session, UH music building, Room 36. • 956-6878
Last night's program included two Mendelssohn movements, Janacek's "Kreutzer Sonata" Quartet, based on Leo Tolstoy's novella of the same title, and culminated in Haydn's eloquent "Seven Last Words of Christ."
Emerson String Quartet
Tonight's program will present the last quartet Haydn published, one of Beethoven's late quartets and a quixotic quartet composed for the Emerson Quartet by the American composer Ned Rorem, whose 10 schizoid movements were inspired by Picasso's paintings.
The Emerson String Quartet, an award-winning ensemble in its 25th year, with a list of recordings to its name, features Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer on violin, Lawrence Dutton on viola and David Finckel on cello.
It was a joy to hear a group so well-matched, that blended so smoothly and balanced so deftly: four distinct voices interacting in shared understanding.
The high point of the evening was Haydn's "Last Words," seven musical meditations on Christ's final statements, the whole framed by a solemn introduction and concluding earthquake. The movements, all slow, all different, are a monument to Haydn's ingenuity: they are deeply religious, humbling in their humility, stunning in their artless genius.
In classical music, the mark of quality lies in the details, and the Emerson Quartet had all the details polished. Every note, whether of melody or in long repeated stretches, was shaped with meaning. The quartet synchronized sudden emphases as thoroughly as gradual tapers, and the passion produced by such seemingly mild-mannered men was startling.
Mendelssohn's Op. 81 opened the concert on a lighter note, while the Janacek piece explored the heart-wrenching anguish of people trapped in a loveless marriage.
In the novel, the Kreutzer sonata provides the turning point: a male friend plays the sonata on violin while the wife accompanies on piano; as the husband listens, he "hears" their love.
At the end, the Emerson Quartet encored a frenetic Shostakovich movement that brought the evening to an exuberant close and the audience to their feet.
