I have no problem with theme programming when it's done well, with
an ear to stylistic and expressive variety, as it is here. All these scores
deserve repeated airings but to tag Dvorák's score as "The
Call" and the other three as "The Response," as Richard Aldag
does in his booklet note, is to impose an arbitrary extra-musical
continuity. There's nothing to suggest that Barber, Griffes or Puts
wrote with Dvorák's quartet in mind - indeed, the Cypress Quartet
specifically commissioned Puts's score as a homage to Beethoven and
Mendelssohn.
Many collectors' interest will undoubtedly centre on the unfamiliar
works. That includes Samuel Barber's quartet, which occupies a
paradoxical niche, as a forward-looking piece best known for a Romantic
movement, the famous
Adagio. The Cypress players avoid the
temptation to make it "about" that movement, even if some
listeners won't. The first movement's melodic lines are
gracefully contoured, while the more driving passages go with a nice point.
The
Adagio, restrained and reverent, moves without pause into the
brief
Molto allegro third movement, which functions as a coda to
it.
Charles Tomlinson Griffes is mostly, and unjustly, remembered as a
purveyor of pastel Orientalisms in the tone-poems
The Pleasure Dome of
Kubla Khan and
The White Peacock. Here, dealing with a
different ethnic influence, he writes in a more substantial vein, though the
high writing at the start is shimmering and diaphanous. Oddly, except for
the pentatonic bit with ostinato bass at 3:43 of the
Lento e mesto,
the music doesn't sound particularly "Indian" - the
"Indians" in question being native Americans, not what my
generation called "Indians from India".
The
Lento assai of Kevin Puts is rather interesting. The first
section shares the concentration and deep voicings of Beethoven's Op.
135 quartet, though its continuing stepwise motion hints at a subconscious
kinship with Barber's
Adagio. A more agitated, even
anguished episode follows, relaxing into a third section where the interplay
of sustained and moving parts fills out the texture, creating the illusion
of more than four instruments.
Dvorák's
American quartet is a
bona fide classic,
and the Cypress Quartet approaches it freshly from the start. The first
movement doesn't so much start as "materialize", as if the
players were picking both the undulating accompaniment and the broad theme
out of the air. I was puzzled, however, by their handling of the second
theme. The first time around, they slow it way down, and the first
violin's rubato is fitful and self-conscious; the repeat keeps the
ritard, but the leader fusses less; in the recapitulation, the theme steps
smartly in tempo, which works best of all. With so much recorded
competition, however, small tonal shortcomings of the Cypress loom larger.
The players are sensitive to the mood changes in the
Lento, for
example, but I could imagine them executed more suavely; the contrasting
passage in the
Molto vivace scherzo also sounds a bit grainy. The
players inject a few ritards into the finale, but its forthright closing
section ends things affirmatively.
The choice and ordering of works here is appealing, making this a good
programme for "listening through", even if you'll want a
more authoritative version of the
American: from the Juilliard
(Sony), say, or the Guarnieri (RCA).
Stephen Francis Vasta
Stephen Francis Vasta is a New York-based conductor, coach, and
journalist.
Masterwork Index:
Dvorak
string quartet 12
