Ensemble Music Society: String quartet etches path toward early and late frontiers of lyricism

Based in the UK, the Castalian just started a North American tour. 

The string quartet as an expansive genre established itself from the start. In addition to its obvious attractions of intimacy, the new medium for two violins, viola, and cello benefited from Joseph Haydn's adventurous resourcefulness. The Austrian composer famously said that due to his remote position under aristocratic patronage, "I was forced to become original."

What the Castalian String Quartet presented under Ensemble Music Society auspices Wednesday night privileged the mainstream and tucked into the middle a work commissioned from the contemporary British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. In all three works, the ensemble displayed a thorough command of delicacy, when needed, and a practiced attention to blended sound. Responsiveness to how the three composers apprehended their compositional tasks was honored in the quartet's interpretations.

 The first movement of Haydn's String Quartet in G minor, op. 20, no. 3 had a distinctive sheen to the sound. It practically glittered. It was not immediately evident that nuance would be part of the Castalian's  personality profile. If that was a disadvantage, it was offset by a sensitivity to Haydn's way of building generative material and forging it into a fresh, imaginative form. Haydn's penchant for irregular phrase lengths requires unanimity of tone and tempo. That rapport is also esssential to recognizing this Haydn hallmark: "the final note of one phrase may turn out to be the first note of the next phrase," in the concise desrciption  of Reginald Barrett-Ayres in his book, "Joseph Haydn and the String Quartet." The  Castalians were fully on point with this '"interlocking" characteristic.

I felt that the Turnage piece, "Awake," chastened the ensemble away from anything that might have been glib in the Haydn. Still, their performance of a typically individualized approach to the medium Haydn practically invented was refined at the Indiana History Center toward the lavish, exquisitely controlled vistas of Schubert's last quartet, the one in G major, op. 161.

That's because Turnage's piece showed his meticulous affinity for creating a sound-world designed for a work's expressive message.  I only know Turnage from a piece he wrote twenty years ago with the American jazz guitarist John Scofield in mind.  "Scorched" is a precise elaboration of Scofield's distinctive sound, which I've described (perhaps  questionably) in writing about this guitarist as "squinchy." It was designed for Scofield plus orchestra. Personality seems to be the composer's concern in instrumental music, though I would have to be acquainted with a wider range of Turnage's music to be sure.

In "Awake," commissioned by the Castalians in 2023, Turnage lays out in two movements the complicated relationship between Beethoven and the biracial violinist George Bridgetower. In one of musical history's great ironies, the masterly violin-piano sonata now called the "Kreutzer" would have come down to us as the "Bridgetower" had composer and violinist not fallen out for reasons still unknown. To render this connection and its division in abstract music, Turnage composed music in which the interpersonal strains are meditated upon in largely quiet music. It runs into and out of tension and displays the string quartet as capable of representing a relationship in other than terms of musical design.

Though substantial in its own right, "Awake" functioned in this program as an appetizer for the Schubert masterpiece. To fully appreciate Schubert at heavenly length, a degree of heavenly patience is called for. With an oddly interior kind of splendor, this work lays before the audience an intimacy with substantial spiritual hints: emotions are more thoroughly explored than in shorter works of its type. 

In this performance, the ferocity of some passages sat logically next to sojourns on the hyper-lyrical plateau. I was especially charmed by the songful playing of Steffan Morris, a cellist of Welsh background of whom it's tempting to say that his country's reputation for melodious vocalism flowers in his playing. 

But when it comes to unanimity of purpose and effect, laudatory mention must be made of his colleagues: violinists Sini Simonen and Daniel Roberts and violist Natalie Loughran. It was a treat to hear such commitment to a fully realized vision of what Schubert and Haydn mean in their essential contributions to the string quartet.