The Diotima Quartet New York Debut

少なくとも私は聴いたことがなかったフランスのQuartet，The Diotima Quartet が，結成以来10数年ぶりに，これまで避けてきたNew York Debut を飾ったそうです．それがアメリカで繁茂している並みのQuartet とはひと味もふた味も違った感銘を聴衆に与えたといいます．

its members were not long out of the conservatory and plays with the energy and passion of a newly minted ensemble. But it has been building its reputation for the last dozen years, largely through its new-music performances and an eclectic discography. といいます．

the quartet made up for that with a two-pronged debut, performing at the Frick Collection on Sunday afternoon and at the Austrian Cultural Forum on Monday evening.

the Frisk Collection では，1834 work by George Onslow                              Janacek’s “Intimate Letters.” 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　the Ravel Quartet　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Roger Reynolds’s “Elliott” (2008)

the Austrian Cultural Forum では，　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　String Quartet No. 6 (2010) by the Scottish composer James Dillon　　　　　　　　Webern’s Five Movements (1909)　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Thomas Larcher’s spacious, five-movement “Madhares” (2007)　　　　　　　　　　　　　がそれぞれ演奏されたそうです．

長文なので，Frick Collection の演奏会評を紹介しますと，

At the Frick the Diotima offered works from around the edges of the standard repertory．George Onslow, a 19th-century French composer of English descent, is one of the group’s specialties．Onslow was called the French Beethoven, and on balance, this 1834 work sounds more Germanic than French. Actually, Beethoven’s influence is less striking here than Mendelssohn’s, particularly in the brisk, cheerful finale.

The players — Naaman Sluchin and Yun-Peng Zhao, violinists; Franck Chevalier, violist; and Pierre Morlet, cellist — rendered Onslow’s rich textures with an attractive but never prettified sound: this was an earthy, lively Romanticism. That sensibility also suffused Janacek’s “Intimate Letters.” The quartet captured the composer’s continual shifts between ecstasy and anguish with a sound that embraced reverie and tumult, lushness and abrasiveness, melodic richness and stark angularity.

The Frick performance closed with a supercharged, tightly unified account of the Ravel Quartet, but as driven and dazzling as the outer movements were, the reading’s most memorable moments were in the slow movement. The haunting juxtaposition of a dark-hued theme and its tremolando accompaniment was perfectly balanced, and muted passages played with a vibratoless, almost organlike tone were especially affecting.  

原文のままの紹介ですが，とにかく賞賛しているのがお分かりいただけると思います．　　　　　　　　at the Austrian Cultural Forum の演奏会については，これ以上原文を並べるより，ご自由なご渉猟にお任せしたいと思います．

ともかく，フランスから第1級の素敵なQuartet が急速に成長してきたことを歓迎し，今後，早い機会の来日を大いに期待したいと思います．　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　

 

Music Review

Capturing Shifts Between Ecstasy and Anguish

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Members of the Diotima Quartet at the Frick: from left, Naaman Sluchin, Yun-Peng Zhao, Franck Chevalier and Pierre Morlet.

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: January 18, 2011

The Diotima Quartet, based in Paris, looks as if its members were not long out of the conservatory and plays with the energy and passion of a newly minted ensemble. But it has been building its reputation for the last dozen years, largely through its new-music performances and an eclectic discography.

Its touring itinerary has bypassed New York until now, but the quartet made up for that with a two-pronged debut, performing at the Frick Collection on Sunday afternoon and at the Austrian Cultural Forum on Monday evening.

At the Frick the Diotima offered works from around the edges of the standard repertory. George Onslow, a 19th-century French composer of English descent, is one of the group’s specialties: its latest CD (on Naïve) offers 3 of his 36 quartets, and the group made a strong case for him with a balanced, at times sumptuous, account of the Quartet No. 30 in C (Op. 56). Onslow was called the French Beethoven, and on balance, this 1834 work sounds more Germanic than French. Actually, Beethoven’s influence is less striking here than Mendelssohn’s, particularly in the brisk, cheerful finale.

The players — Naaman Sluchin and Yun-Peng Zhao, violinists; Franck Chevalier, violist; and Pierre Morlet, cellist — rendered Onslow’s rich textures with an attractive but never prettified sound: this was an earthy, lively Romanticism. That sensibility also suffused Janacek’s “Intimate Letters.” The quartet captured the composer’s continual shifts between ecstasy and anguish with a sound that embraced reverie and tumult, lushness and abrasiveness, melodic richness and stark angularity.

The Frick performance closed with a supercharged, tightly unified account of the Ravel Quartet, but as driven and dazzling as the outer movements were, the reading’s most memorable moments were in the slow movement. The haunting juxtaposition of a dark-hued theme and its tremolando accompaniment was perfectly balanced, and muted passages played with a vibratoless, almost organlike tone were especially affecting.

At the Austrian Cultural Forum the quartet put its modernist side on display. The ability to switch gears quickly and fluidly, as it did in the Janacek, served it particularly well here, and that talent was tested immediately in the restlessly assertive String Quartet No. 6 (2010) by the Scottish composer James Dillon. Mr. Dillon’s sound world is variegated and changeable: sudden crescendos evaporate in pianissimo chords; quiet pizzicato passages unfold into sequences of descending slides that evoke whining, at times, and exoticism elsewhere.

After the Dillon, Webern’s Five Movements (1909) sounded like an antiquity. It was not that the players underemphasized Webern’s free use of dissonance and spare, often eerie timbres; they reveled in them. But they also made the most of occasional backward glances that, even where they last only a bar or two, offer what in this reading seemed a wistful memory of a vanishing world.

Roger Reynolds’s “Elliott” (2008) opens with an exquisite soliloquy for violin — given a virtuosic reading by Mr. Zhao (the two violinists alternate in the first chair) — and expands into a concise but intense meditation that has elements in common with the Dillon score.

The quartet closed its program with Thomas Larcher’s spacious, five-movement “Madhares” (2007), a work it recorded for an ECM compilation of Mr. Larcher’s music, released last year. It is an extraordinary piece: like the Dillon, it is rich in effects, and its language can be abstruse, even terrifying.

One section seemed to combine the avian swarm of Hitchcock’s “Birds” with the violin stabs in Bernard Hermann’s “Psycho” score. Yet these tense sections often melt into something entirely different — modal, folksy melodies, refracted through lightly dissonant harmonies, for example, or unabashedly shimmering Romanticism.

The score, inspired by the White Mountains of Crete, was both familiar and otherworldly, and left a listener eager to hear it again.