Escher String Quartet takes an aggressive approach to chamber music
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Version 0 of 1. On Sunday at the Phillips Collection, the Escher String Quartet offered a bracing antidote to the season of ubiquitous “Messiahs” and treacly “Nutcrackers.” Bookending its program with the violent psychodrama of works by Leos Janacek and Alexander Zemlinsky, the New York-based ensemble presented a highly charged and emotionally wrenching afternoon of chamber music. Janacek’s String Quartet No. 1, which opened the concert, established the Escher’s fundamental approach to the program: aggressive attacks, a vivid declamatory style and urgent drama. Composed in 1923, the quartet was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which marital jealousy erupts in murderous rage. The Escher members — violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Aaron Boyd, violist Pierre Lapointe and cellist Brook Speltz — made the most out of the music’s narrative contrasts in a tense, expressionistic performance. The Escher’s bruising style and somewhat grainy sound proved a less natural fit for a composer such as Felix Mendelssohn. The quartet appeared determined to dispel the conventional view of Mendelssohn as a purveyor of genteel, well-mannered compositions with a robust reading of the String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 44, No. 2. The wistful opening movement ventured into unusually dark territory, while the hard-driven finale verged on bombast. Barnett-Hart did capture the sweet lyricism of the slow movement, but overall the piece could have stood a lighter, more refined touch. Zemlinsky’s Second Quartet (1913-15), which made up the second half of the program, was simply on another level. The sprawling work, which stretches over 40 minutes in a single movement, is said to express the complex agonies of Zemlinsky’s teeming psychological world and tragic personal life. The Escher String Quartet navigated the fearsome technical and artistic challenges with dauntless ease, sustaining tireless concentration and a gutsy, take-no-prisoners approach to Zemlinsky’s emotional tumult. After myriad musical digressions that flirt with atonality, the piece came to rest in the radiant key of D in a poignant affirmation of tonality: home for the holidays, indeed. Chin is a freelance writer. |