Mr Facing-Both-Ways: Debussy stands out in French quartet's visit

Ebene Quartet paid its third visit here with different personnel 

In "The Pilgrim's Progress," Mr. Facing Both Ways is an allegorical no-no in the strict Christian terms of someone who cannot resist looking on both the sacred and profane paths forward. This amounted to one of the author John Bunyan's warnings against waywardness.

In musical terms, the evidence of a divided consciousness may also be labeled a fault. Yet Claude Debussy succeeded in forging a new musical style that has amazingly found acceptance among music-lovers with conservative tastes for almost a century and a half. Still, innovation is basic to everything he wrote. 

My predecessor as music critic for the Michigan newspaper I worked for long ago memorably dismissed  "impressionism" (a term Debussy rejected but continues to adhere to his music) as "the petering-out of well-worn romantic trails." 

But such a performance as the Ebene Quartet laid down of the French composer's String Quartet in G minor affirmed its trail-blazing status. No petering out here. The romantic trail doesn't fade into the underbrush in this and other major Debussy works, but heads off in new directions that in many respects steered a path forward for modernism.

The 1893 work cannot be more convincingly played than it was Wednesday night, when the Ensemble Music Society presented the French quartet at the Indiana History Center. Aspects of the explicit swells of feeling that romantic music accustomed listeners to were blended into episodes loaded with delicate tendrils of sound. When the tension subsided, it was not signaled by contrasting material, as was the habit of Central European romanticism. There is instead a manipulation of material already presented in place of the development set in place in the Austro-German tradition. 

The control and expressive restraint of first violinist Pierre Colombet was remarkable, and it imprinted on his colleagues a similar sensitivity to the ebb and flow of the score, especially in the finale. The Ebene always seemed to speak in the same coordinated manner, as was clear in the program's initial work, Mozart's Quartet no. 15 in D minor, K. 421. 

Even the rests spoke as definitely as the notes in music that drew the admiration of a senior Austrian master, Joseph Haydn, when the six quartets later dedicated to Haydn were new.  K. 421 was among them. The work's conventionality still bore the stamp of the young composer's signature, as in the foursquare theme-and-variations movement that concludes the piece.

The Ebene Quartet devoted the concert's second half to Brahms's Quartet no. 2 in A minor, op. 51, no. 2. The performers took a rhythmically stable, well-balanced approach to the work. There was an apparently heartfelt representation of Brahms at his most lyrical in the second movement, and the third, headed "Quasi Minuetto," followed through on the suggestion that this was a "sort-of minuet," with a fresh look at the dance origin of movements similarly positioned in the string-quartet tradition.  At length, to make it clear that its sensitivity isn't only a matter of detailed nuances, the Ebene put more than adequate rhythmic heft and momentum into the "Finale: Allegro non assai."