Greg Stepanich

New music coming for Delray quartet

The Delray String Quartet has commissioned a new work from the University of Miami’s Thomas Sleeper for its upcoming season; the world premiere of Sleeper’s quartet will be heard Feb. 1, 2009.

At their final concert of the current season last Sunday at its Colony Hotel home on East Atlantic Avenue, quartet officials also said the group will play specially arranged movements from Frederick Delius’ Florida Suite on successive concerts.

Delius (pictured above) spent a couple years in Florida in the 1880s, trying to make a go of an orange grove in a place called Solano Grove (which was about 35 miles south of Jacksonville on the St. Johns River).

It seems to me that a recording of the Delius arrangement plus the Sleeper quartet would make a good recording project for the group if everything works out well with that music next year.

The Delray Quartet itself, to judge by its final concert of music by Schumann (the Quartet No. 2 in F, Op. 41, No. 2) and Rachmaninov (the surviving two movements of the first of his two fragmentary string quartets), remains an interesting work in progress.

It’s a quartet with great talent that gives sometimes uneven performances, that plays in an interesting venue — the Colony’s music room — that sometimes is inhospitable to music (when the motorcycles go by the open windows, or the humidity in the non-air-conditioned room reaches 150 percent), and that still needs someone with a more professional touch to clean up its error-filled program flyers.

I’ve made the points before, and I still hope for a change or two before the next season starts in November. Maybe we can get new flyers, maybe the group can give a sixth concert in a different venue. It’s worth calling attention to this again, because this is a group that has enough talent to really distinguish itself regionally if it takes a slightly different approach.

In the Schumann Second Quartet on Sunday, the foursome — violinists Mei-Mei Luo and Laszlo Pap; violist Richard Fleischman and cellist Ian Maksin — often sounded fine, especially in the scherzo of the third movement, which sounded to me as though it had received most of the rehearsal focus: It was tight, crisp, full of energy and a joy to hear.

But the opening movement, though it had a rich, full sound, was unduly stiff much of the time. The primary theme never seemed to flow; there was a sense of pushing and tension, particularly from Luo, that gave the music a labored quality that detracted from Schumann’s sunny music.

The Rachmaninov quartet, on the other hand, was a good bit better. The two movements from this quartet, written in 1889 when the composer was just 16, are quite respectable and well worth hearing. The first movement’s intensely Russian sense of melancholy is already characteristically Rachmaninov’s, and the Delray Quartet played this lovely late Romantic music expertly.

The second movement was just as fine, striking the right balance of lightness and seriousness in the Tchaikovsky-influenced waltz theme that launches the movement. After a crowd-pleasing arrangement of George Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me, the Delray closed the book on another season.

In the coming one, it has the chance to carve out another identity for itself as an American quartet, and that’s the music I’ll be looking for starting this November.