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The
Edmonton Journal String
Quartet presents varied, interesting program It may sound obvious, but one of the cool things about the performance of the Penderecki String Quartet Wednesday night was the fact that the entire concert was bows on strings. No percussives, no Bartok pizzicato - in fact there was little pizzicato, just a few bars here and there for the cello. And yet from the silly to the sublime, with a stop in Charlie Mingus' world via Glenn Buhr, the night was as varied and interesting as a string quartet program gets. No small measure of credit for that should go to the Penderecki Quartet's sense of ensemble. Given that second violinist Jeremy Bell's tenure with them is measured in weeks, that's an incredible accomplishment. This group is tight to each other -- and they know it. In the stops and starts of the concert's first work, the "Frog" Quartet of Josef Haydn, the group played up the tricky parts - a bit of quartet virtuosity. Glenn Buhr's Quartet No. 2 goes from sections demanding taxing individual attention within the whole to break-neck passages where all four need to be exactly together. The group's sense for each member was unflagging. Haydn's work was given a jaunty, almost edgy presentation. Contrasts within movements of tempo, dynamic and mood were really emphasized, occasionally to the point of overstatement - but this is, after all, one of Haydn's smiling, silly pieces, complete with a finale whose motif sounded, back then, rather frog-like. Buhr, a colleague of the Penderecki Quartet at the faculty of Wilfrid Laurier University, wrote his Second Quartet as a set of variations on Charlie Mingus' Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. Cast in a single movement, the work is transitory, shifting gradually from agitation to stormy to undulation to serene, if a little sad. A brief, but interesting journey given a solid presentation. One of the greatest quartets ever written completed the concert. Beethoven constructed his Op. 132 A minor Quartet around the central movement - a vast hymn of thanksgiving, a noble, tender and utterly transcendant bit of music. On either side are movements of storm, rustic roughness and spiky humour. There were some interesting artistic choices made in this work by the Penderecki players - which is, I guess, a polite way of saying that one may not have agreed with them all, but giving them their say, they played quite well. The essential central movement, most especially, was beautifully caught. Convocation
Hall was disappointingly bare - maybe a third of its seats were filled
to hear a truly impressive Canadian-based ensemble present a most impressive
performance. |
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