Jupiter String Quartet, violist Roger Tapping
From civilization to Hell, and back again
March 16, 2010The Boston-based Jupiter String Quartet, which made its highly auspicious San Antonio Chamber Music Society in 2006, returned on March 14 with its polish and intensity fully intact.
The members of the Jupiter remain unchanged from the first visit -- violinists Nelson Lee and Megan Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel and cellist Daniel McDonough.
Temple Beth-El was the venue for a split-personality program. The bookends were poised, lively accounts of two works from the heart of the classical-Romantic tradition -- Franz Joseph Haydn’s Quartet in F Minor, Op. 20, No. 5, and (augmented by the excellent violist Roger Tapping) Johannes Brahms’s Quintet in G, Op. 111. The book was Osvaldo Golijov’s 1992 “Yiddishbbuk,” a Modernist lamentation of harrowing impact.
Several distinct influences contend and flow together in Golijov’s musical output. As a boy in his native Argentina he came under the sway of Astor Piazolla, but Golijov also was acquainted with klezmer music and spoke Yiddish, the native language of his Eastern European Jewish parents. In his twenties, after a few years in Israel, he moved to the United States to study under George Crumb, an unalloyed Modernist known for his explorations of unusual sonorities and idiosyncratic forms. And in some pieces one can hear distant echoes of baroque style.
As the title implies, “Yiddishbbuk” owes much to Eastern European Jewish traditions -- klezmer, liturgical chant -- but with a strong dose of Modernism. The first of its three short movements pays homage to three children who died in the Holocaust. In its dissonances and extremes of near-stasis and frantic motion, the whole piece evokes suffering, weeping, violence, questioning. It’s no walk in the park, but then neither was the Holocaust.
The Jupiter delivered it all fearlessly, but also with control. There is an order to Golijov's music, even when it is discomfiting, and order did emerge in this performance
In Haydn and Brahms, the order is of a more familiar and civilized kind. The playing was consistently elegant in technique, beautiful in tone and true to each composer’s style. Although nothing was overstated, the players never let a line sit inert. In Brahms, especially, subtle shading of dynamics and shaping of phrases kept the music dancing.
Mike
Greenberg
