By Heather Kurzbauer: Late January in Amsterdam is usually accompanied by blustery weather and grey skies. Leave it to the fragility and intensity of the string quartet genre to change dreary weather.
With a stellar line-up of 25 quartets, surprising treats such as the Fourth Edition of the String Quartet Biennale (SQBA) edition offers music for the soul. Following an opening by students from Amsterdams Leerorkest and the superlative Danish Quartet, Sunday morning brought a rare brightness to the SQBAs opening day, blinding sunshine for a day of Bartok.
Yes, you read correctly, all six Bartok quartets performed on one day by the Belcea Quartet, the Doric String Quartet, and the Jerusalem Quartet. Mini-interviews and a rather longwinded musicological interlude replete with information were offered between the quartet pairs. As a young conservatory student sitting nearby quipped, "Why do intellectuals always rely on complicated terms, long sentences for their presentations? It is so 90s." For all the admirable verbal twists and turns, it is the music that speaks. And speak it did.
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The Jerusalem Quartet. Photo by Felix Broede.
In an afternoon of Bartokian angst and riotous folk music, standouts included the Doric Quartets physical and highly gestural playing and the Belcea Quartets command of silence that proved less can be more in terms of gesture in Bartoks Fifth Quartet. While listening to the Doric leads to a focus on individual fine tuning, the Jerusalem four riveted the listener with their maximized soundspaces and unreal level of technical perfection, the focus moved from the individual to the extraordinary balance of all four musicians.
In a brief pre-performance interview, violist Ori Kam pointed out that each movement of Bartoks sixth quartet opens with a "Mesto" tempo marking. "It is an unusual marking, only Beethoven chose to use it before. 'Mesto' conjures hopelessness, depth. Bartoks life at that dark point in time (1945) was both at the beginning and the end of an era, certainly not in a positive way, so relevant to our world today." Their incredible palette of sound and emotion, the lingering tritones signaling the edge of despair brought these words to life.
True to the genres roots, mornings at the SQBA open with a rendition of a Haydn quartet. From the founder of the string quartet, fast forward 50 years when Beethoven lifted the genre to a level of great contrasts and uncanny abstraction in his famed late quartets.
To wrap up each night approaching midnight, the Biennale presents late Beethoven quartets moving the spotlight from the well-established Brentano and Belcea Quartets to newcomers on the Amsterdam scene: Kitgut, Leonkoro, Marmen and Simply String Quartets.
Not to be missed, a series of SQBA master classes offered by the greats to up-and-coming quartets entices both audience and participants to experience work in progress. In a revelatory morning session, two members of the Jerusalem Quartet offered words of wisdom to the young Amsterdam-based ADAM Quartet.
Challenging the extremely tense performers to open up and define "what is revolutionary about Mendelssohns Opus 13 #2?" while calmly advising them on "how to create the illusion that what we hear goes far beyond the reality of what we do" turned teaching moments into magic.
Later that evening, the spell was broken when pro-Palestinian demonstrators poured out their wrath on the audience and performers disrupting the Jerusalem Quartets evening concert with catcalls preceded by flyers that insinuated that concert attendance was tantamount to warfare. The Jerusalem Quartet rose above the situation to deliver a spellbinding performance of Shostakovichs Second string quartet.
The rest of the celebratory week presents a cornucopia of offerings, veritably something for every listener. The historically informed Butter Quartet joined by Lute Legends will make its SQBA debut. The thematic relevance of folk music as impulse and inspiration leads to such provocative offerings as Island Suite, an evening in which the British cellist-composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson draws on Jamaican folk music performed by the Solem Quartet. The Dutch-based Ragazze Quartet will premiere a work by the extraordinarily gifted Seung-Won Oh and the Caldore Quartet joined by members of the Urban Jazz Dance company will rock the house. Alive and certainly kicking, the fourth edition of the SQBA expands its reach to celebrate the power of four.
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The Jerusalem Quartet. Photo by Felix Broede.
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