Viano Quartet
REVIEW: Newly Discovered Octet Gets West Coast Premiere at Music@Menlo
From San Francisco Classical Voice
By David Bratman
Music@Menlo’s mainstage concert on Saturday, July 27 expressed this summer’s theme — French chamber music in a broader context — by pairing French and American pieces composed between 1896 and 1936. The French works were by Maurice Ravel, the emblematic composer for this year’s festival. (The next day, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet gave a marathon recital of all of Ravel’s pieces for solo piano.)
The festival was fortunate in getting the Viano Quartet to play the sole string quartets of Ravel and Samuel Barber. The Viano players have an extraordinary facility with 20th-century music, and both of these pieces came out splendidly and with searing memorability.
The Viano took the bulk of Ravel’s well-known String Quartet in F Major with a light delicacy far removed from the torpor that the piece’s lurid harmonies can sometimes descend into. This approach, which came near to reverence in the slow movement, made a strong contrast with the music’s more energetic excursions. The beginning of the finale was fierce, even slashing, before relaxing into a gentler idiom. The scherzo begins with, and frequently returns to, bursts of pizzicato from all four instruments. It’s difficult to make pizzicato notes slash fiercely through the texture, but the Viano Quartet managed that.
Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor, Op. 11, was an even finer performance. This piece is in the form of a sandwich, with two outer movements made of the same material: fast, crusty, and querulous. Nicholas Swett’s program notes use the term “chromatic squiggles” to describe the melodic line here. The creamy filling is the slow movement that Barber would later orchestrate as the famous Adagio for Strings.
The Viano Quartet surprised listeners with its treatment of both of the score’s modes. The outer movements, for all their squiggling, were strongly lyrical and melodic as well as declarative. They were filled with rich harmonies between the players and equally rich double stops produced individually.
The warm geniality in the outer movements prevented the Molto adagio from getting lost between them. Nor was this movement itself anything to be forgotten. This was a performance of gentle solemnity, with all the weight of the orchestral arrangement. The melodic line — starting on Lucy Wang’s first violin and elegantly passed on to Aiden Kane’s viola before being taken up in turn by the others — was smoothly carried out as it extended on and on, generating the feeling of breathing. After all, Barber was a major composer of vocal music.