GREENSBORO – The first concert of the season in the Summer Music from Greensboro series took place Tuesday, July 9, at the Greensboro United Church of Christ, featuring the Telegraph Quartet from San Francisco, the fourth time the group has been invited.
Founded 10 years ago, the group consists of Eric Chin and Joseph Maile on the violin, Pei-Ling Lin on the viola, and Jeremiah Shaw on cello. They play with a passionate intensity combined with precise coordination that makes the music really come alive.
Both Chin and Maile gave insightful introductory remarks about the selected pieces, and Kai Christian’s program notes were extensive and excellent.
The concert consisted of quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Fanny
Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847), and Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904).
Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 6 in B Flat Major, Op. 18 (La Malinconia) was written relatively early in his career and shows both his indebtedness to Hayden’s and Mozart’s quartet models and his own remarkable originality. The first movement, Allegro con brio, starts off with a high energy burst and evolves into lyrical moments with fine dynamics. One of the significant advantages of live performances is the richness of strong and soft passages of sound, which is usually cut out by sound engineers in recordings to preclude listeners from having to fuss with their volume dials. In the second movement, Adagio ma no troppo, Beethoven reveals himself as a master of surprises. The tempo proceeds at a very measured pace with the harmonious blending of instruments, but the movement is
unexpectedly broken by short, silent interruptions. In the faster Scherzo Allegro that follows, Beethoven elaborates with the opening theme in a playful dialogue with some sharp bowing, especially from the first violin. The last movement, La Malinconia Adagio-Allegretto quasi allegro, was very restrained in its progression, with an underlying tension that keeps us guessing what the composer is going to do next, leading to a release that is characteristic of the drama in all of Beethoven’s music. Here, the initial melancholy of the scoring breaks into a beautiful melody with variations that sing in the finale.
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was the sister of Felix and was equally precocious in her early musical development, but sadly as a woman was discouraged by her family from pursuing a full career as a composer. The systematic suppression of half of humanity over numerous centuries has greatly retarded our progress as a species in all respects! Her String Quartet in E-flat major, H. 277 (written 1829/1834), goes interesting places harmonically, beyond her classical training, with tonal innovations that prefigure later musical developments in the 19th Century. The slow first movement, Adagio ma non troppo, was juxtaposed in the second Allegretto by skipping dance-like rhythms with hints of counterpoint in the emerging theme, light in ambience but with a depth of color in the notation. The Romanza was at first more meditative, but then had patterns of rising out of the lower register to a higher plane. The last movement, Allegro molto vivace, had a rhythmic complexity with a nice swing to it, and some more counterpoint culminating in a triumphal ending. The superb musicianship of all the players earned them a standing ovation for their high energy performance.
After the intermission, the third piece of the evening was Antonin Dvorak’s String Quartet No. 14 in A flat Major, Op. 105 B. 193, the last of his 14 works in that genre, written in 1895. The beginning movement, Adagio ma non troppo-Allegro appassionato, evolved initially from a slow pace in the lower end of the scales not immediately disclosing the melody, into a graceful melody having a complex, overlapping of the string instruments in rich sonorities. In the Molto vivace that followed, Dvorak gives us a vigorous theme and a second lyrical one with a lot of feeling. The third section, Lento e molto cantabile, suggested the phrasing of the singing voice (as in the marking, “cantabile”) shifting from a more serious mood to lighter rhythms with pizzicotto on the cello. In the last movement, Allegro non tonto, we heard a harmonious fusion of all the instruments with intricate textures, to which the Telegraph Quartet artists gave their full ensemble effect, receiving a second standing ovation from the very appreciative audience.
As an encore, they played a short, enthusiastic dance piece by Kenji Bunche of the Craftsbury Chamber Players, from his Apocryphal Dances, and he appeared in person to thank them.
The next concert in the Summer Music from Greensboro series will take place on Tuesday, July 23, at 7:30 p.m., and will feature the Manhattan Chamber Players with works by Mozart and Schubert. For more information, go online at summermusicfromgreensboro.net
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
