NY Philharmonic String Quartet triumphs in annual collaboration between two organizations

The Adagio introduction to Mozart's String Quartet in C major, K. 465, no longer appears to be flecked with "mistakes," since so much of the "dissonance" that provides its nickname was embedded in music through the century following the composer's death in 1791.

New York Philharmonic String Quartet nearly filled Landmarks Center.

What remains is the expressive contrast that is so common in Mozart's music. Thus, the flowing statement that the New York Philharmonic String Quartet made as it launched its concert at Indiana Landmarks Center sounded natural and of a piece with all that followed. 

 

The white-key tonality emerges supreme in this work, and the consonance proved also a hallmark of how these four principals work together. Like the best full-time string quartets, these musicians are used to processing all-points bulletins from the music played around them in their workaday jobs with the New York Philharmonic. Their success as a unit is keyed to how well they listen — a factor frankly never absent from any successful music performance.

The ensemble's presentation here Tuesday night represented the current season's collaboration by the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis and the Ensemble Music Society. The guest artists' link to the IVCI  comes through first violinist Frank Huang, Philharmonic concertmaster and 2002 competition laureate. Other members are Quianquian Li, second violin; Cynthia Phelps, viola, and Carter Brey, cello.

The center's Grand Hall was nearly filled to its capacity of 560 for a concert that also included Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet and a short work by the young, Atlanta-based composer Joel Thompson. 

In the "Dissonance" Quartet, the way a recurring four-note figure was passed around in the second movement was a model of similarity in tone and articulation. And the solidity of dynamic contrasts in quick succession in the minuet (third movement) prepared the way for the dramatic oomph of the Trio. 

Here again, when this well-played, Mozart's instrumental music calls to mind the variety and significance of his writing for operatic voices. The finale carried out its responsibility to dispel whatever shadows lingered from that notorious first-movement introduction. Mozart at his sunniest, most energetic and most worldly-wise came to the fore in this performance.

Joel Thompson composed "Response."

Thompson's work, around five minutes long, has the tendentious but justifiable title of "In Response to the Madness." Written in 2019, it is the composer's answer to "the political mayhem, the massacres, the climate, and our seemingly futile attempts at trying to make things better." The quotation comes from Thompson's program note, which ends with the hope that  — against all evidence to date — music may help generate positive change.

Who could resist clasping such a composition to his or her bosom? Written not to a program but to a purpose, this is a piece that occupies a more reflective distance from current anxieties than the late George Crumb's "Black Angels," a piece for amplified string quartet composed in another annus horribilis, 1970. The vehemence here is contrasted with simple anxiety and lamentation.

Lyrical moments provide hopeful signs amid the gut punches of recurring tumult in music that gets right to the point. They sink back down with a touch of sentimental resignation. The violence that then threatens to dominate is checked by a slow, muted passage with contrapuntal aspects that I take to be a dogged effort to find emotional balance. The speed and dark vigor then build up to a final, stark chord. The piece amounts to effective African-American commentary with a columnist's conciseness, on the order of Leonard Pitts, Eugene Robinson or Charles M. Blow.

After intermission came a riveting performance of Franz Schubert's Quartet in D minor, D. 810. It draws its apt title from the second movement's inspired variations of the composer's song "Death and the Maiden." As Nicholas Johnson's fine program note points out, death haunts the entire composition by implication. When it sorrows, it's funereal. When it dances, it's a Totentanz (to borrow the German word Franz Liszt applied to a work based on much-used Latin chant of no comfort, Dies irae). 

As a music critic, Robert Schumann famously admired Schubert's "heavenly lengths"; this string quartet goes to hellish lengths. The consolation comes in the fascination the music consistently arouses in listeners mesmerized by the score's imaginative variety. Performances so forceful and well-blended as this one probably never weary anyone. The suspenseful denouement in the finale could hardly have put a firmer stamp on the command the New York Philharmonic String Quartet displayed throughout the concert.