Greg Stepanich

New quartet shows promise

Chamber music has always been about intimacy, even when the thoughts it expresses are those of the heaven-stormers such as Beethoven.

And so it was hard to imagine how a string quartet might do battle with the sounds of a busy street outside: Booming car basses, motorcycles, laughter and all the other things you might expect on Delray Beach's East Atlantic Avenue on a beautiful, warm January afternoon.

But the new Delray String Quartet, giving its second concert ever in the open-door music room of the historic Colony Hotel downtown, brought enough commitment to its program of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Johann Strauss père et fils to make its generous audience shut those noises out for an hour or so.

The Delray String Quartet, from left: Laszlo Pap, second violin; Susan Moyer, cello; Debra Spring, viola; Mei Mei Luo, first violin. (Photo by Greg Stepanich)

This is a new ensemble, and thus there were some unfinished rooms in its metaphorical house, along with some difficulties with intonation and togetherness. The sound of the group tends to be big, dark and passionate, well in line with the unbuttoned playing of a quartet like the Zehetmair, whose no-holds-barred recording of two Schumann quartets in 2003 had critics taking another awed look at that literature.

So this is a modern band, by that standard, and therefore it should be interesting to hear what its members do with some more contemporary music, such as the Barber Op. 11 they have planned for February, and the Shostakovich First Quartet they are programming for March. In any case, the Delrays offered strong readings Sunday night of some canonical masterworks, and all told, this is a group well worth seeing again.

Much of the spotlight Sunday afternoon was on Mei Mei Luo, the first violinist, who had a commanding role in the First String Quartet (F major, Op, 18, No. 1) of Beethoven. Luo is a fiery player, unafraid to dig in and aim for the grand gesture. She had some tuning problems throughout the first movement, though these cleared up as the music progressed. She also is a nimble-fingered instrumentalist, which paid off handsomely for the somber, operatic beauties of the second movement.

She was less successful with the opening of the finale, which wasn't as clean as it should have been, and that made the beginning of that movement somewhat unsteady. There were some ensemble problems also at the start of the third movement, and it wasn't until after the first 20 bars that the Delrays were able to find their footing.

Despite these blemishes, I enjoyed this reading of the Beethoven because the Delray quartet was in tune with the boisterous, surprising wit of this piece, and even more importantly, it was an advocate of all of the composer's ideas. Beethoven is a writer of enormous invention, and musicians who don't understand that even the smallest gesture he makes (such as the offhand motif of the First Quartet's initial bars) is full of life and consequence are not going to give persuasive performances of his music.

Fortunately, that was not the case here. The quartet (Luo; second violinist Laszlo Pap; violist Debra Spring and cellist Susan Moyer) clearly enjoyed playing this work, and they made the most of its dramas, from the sudden silences in the middle of the slow movement to the almost giddy waltzing of the scherzo. Some of the detail work needed a little more attention — i.e., the contrasts of the scherzo weren't sharp enough, which didn't give us enough of the shock Beethoven has written into the score —- but that's the sort of thing that will come with more rehearsal and more time together as a group.

The Beethoven was followed by an intense, soulful rendition of the Andante cantabile movement from Tchaikovsky's First Quartet. Luo, also the focus of this piece, had some intonation problems in the first apperance of the exposed second subject, but that was not the case when the theme returned in its G-string version toward the end.

The concert closed with a tasteful arrangement, well-played, of Johann Strauss Jr.'s On the Beautiful Blue Danube, which as Moyer noted in a charming talk to the audience, is pretty much required listening for the new year. Another standard of the Viennese New Year celebrations closed the concert: The Radetzky March of Johann Strauss Sr., heard here in an effective arrangement by local composer Clark McAllister.

Posted by at January 3, 2005 3:44 PM