Orion String Quartet:
Beethoven informs a new work, and vice versa
February 18, 2008The planned symmetry of the Orion String Quartet's concert on Sunday for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society fell afoul of foul weather in New York. The plane carrying violinist Daniel Phillips was still approaching the local airport when the troupe was to have opened with Mendelssohn's A Minor Quartet, which was modeled on the closing work, Beethoven's A Minor. For the centerpiece, the Orion programmed Lowell Liebermann's brand new Quartet No. 4, which shares much of the dark, unsettled atmosphere of the Beethoven.
Mendelssohn having been scrubbed, violinist Todd Phillips, violist Steven Tenenbom and cellist Timothy Eddy passed the time with a robust, forcefully punctuated account of Beethoven's String Trio in C Minor. The prodigal arrived at Temple Beth-El at 3:54 p.m. and 10 minutes later joined his colleague in the second public performance of the Liebermann work. It had been composed for the Orion, which gave the first performance on Feb. 9 in Rochester.
It's a remarkable piece. The mood is elegiacal and meditative, the melodic lines sinuous and searching, the harmonies rich and astonishingly beautiful. Liebermann works within the tradition of Western tonality, but that is a mansion with many rooms. Liebermann inhabits all of them as his expressive purposes require, and he doesn't mind knocking down a wall to create new harmonic spaces.
The Fourth Quartet doesn't exactly fit the "neoromantic" niche into which Liebermann is sometimes placed. Much of the music, especially near the beginning, is a highly advanced and fluid chromatic expressionism with modernist tendencies. Sometimes this roiling cloudscape breaks open to allow a patch of near-classical harmony and almost-resolution. Near the midpoint the clouds lift in leaping modulations. Several chordal passages recall Russian Orthodox chant. Suddenly, when you've begin to think the somber, deliberate pace has gone on a bit too long, Liebermann introduces a kind of hobbled, stilted jazz idiom. The piece dies in pensive quiet.
If Liebermann's quartet was informed by Beethoven's, the Orion's performance of the Beethoven seemed to have been informed by the Liebermann. The A Minor's second movement, a minuet, ordinarily seems out of place between the profoundly serious movements flanking it -- and especially odd as a prelude to the slow third movement, which portrays the composer's gradual recovery from an illness he had feared would kill him. But the Orion played the minuet with something like the hobbled, stilted quality that Liebermann had asked for in the jazzy section of his quartet. Drained of gracefulness, though not of flexibility, the minuet suggested the mechanical, disengaged feeling we have when we try to walk while suffering from a high fever. Aha!
Not that the playing was in any way mechanical or diengaged. As in the Orion's 2002 appearance on the same concert series, the performances throughout were committed, deeply considered and fearless. This concert was not the last word in ensemble unity or integrated, creamy sound: The players responded to each other as individuals with distinct personalities. That's a perfectly valid approach, especially when it invests the music with the vitality and high-stakes expressiveness the Orion brought to every phrase.
Mike
Greenberg
