Return visit by Isidore Quartet includes added attraction of top clarinet soloist

The bated-breath response of the audience the last time the Isidore String Quartet was here turned out to be a feature of its return visit Wednesday night at the Indiana History Center. It has to do with the scrupulously laid-out alternation of tension and release of its characteristic playing. In both concerts, it was easy to get the sense that the capacity audience was hanging on every note, unwilling to miss a thing.

This time, the patrons' sustained attention got the extra reward of a famous collaborator: Anthony McGill,

Waiting for the sunrise: the Isidore String Quartet

principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic. McGill played the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op. 115, with the Isidore, in addition to "Humanity's Essential Gems," a work for the same instruments by contemporary composer James Lee III. 

As I observed then about the Isidore's performance of an early Haydn quartet: "It was evident that the breadth of nuance the Isidore commands allows it to give a firm, unified account of the softest side of the dynamic spectrum."

This time Haydn was represented as the guest ensemble's way of re-introducing itself: the "Sunrise" Quartet in B-flat major, op. 76, no. 4. And the same kind of playing was evident, in addition to something special — the way the Isidore projected an ingratiating personality fully consonant with the bright side of the "father of the string quartet" in one of his late masterpieces.

The sections of each movement were clearly delineated, almost to the point of being deliberate pauses. The third-movement minuet had its dance character robust and fully formed, and the folk influence of the drone texture in the trio section was lively and insistent. The charm of the dance returned along with the main section of the movement. In the finale, there was further use of dynamic softening, lending suspense to transitional phrases. As the work neared the end, the accelerating pace created a whirlwind feeling, controlled yet impassioned.

Anthony McGill displayed fellow feeling with the Isidore. 

McGill entered the festivities with the Lee work, which occupied a place for African-American compositional representation that two years ago went to Billy Childs. Last Sunday night, "Humanity's Essential Gems" received its premiere in New York. It was commissioned by the People's Symphony Concerts, an organization devoted to building interest in classical music among patrons of limited means.

In one variegated movement, "Humanity's Essential Gems" consistently displayed the rapport evident between this string quartet and this distinguished clarinetist.  A mid-range melody for the clarinet is accompanied by pizzicato strings. Then, when the clarinet moves to the upper register, the strings apply their bows to create a cushiony foundation. This sort of amenable contrast is typical of the work as a whole. With calculated charisma, slow music abruptly engages all five players in an almost static episode, marked by brief clarinet flourishes to decorate the strings' pleasant muttering near the end. 

Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B minor occupied the concert's second half, with all that rapport working over a vast terrain. Intensity of expression ebbed and flowed unanimously in the first movement, and the second found the muted strings in genial embrace of the wind instrument. That vast terrain is shortened in perspective by a third movement that received its graceful due in this performance.

Brahms was the romantic era's master of variation form. In fact, his classical roots, which made him seem old-fashioned against the brouhaha accorded the "music of the future," are centered in his zest for shedding an ingenious variety of light upon straightforward thematic material. The fourth movement is a case in point. Wednesday's performance was animated throughout and never flagged in interest, right through the work's emphatic yet subdued final measures. "Und damit basta!" the echt-Deutsch composer says.