Daedalus Quartet, 12/10/04

On Friday, December 10, 2004, the Daedalus Quartet made its Carnegie Hall debut in Weill Recital Hall with a program of Haydn, Carter, and Beethoven. I have made attempts to write a real (i.e., non-prolix) review of this concert and have found myself stymied by a couple factors:

1. I’m friends with the violist, Jessi Thompson, and was staying at the apartment she and her husband Evan have in Washington Heights later that evening, so I’m not sure that my opinions are not colored by an extreme readiness to hear something good.
2. I was in the front row. The Daedalus makes a big noise, which left me pretty overwhelmed midway through the Beethoven. I felt my conscious attention on the actual music slipping away as I was transported to distant Beethovenian realms where everything is both hyperintense and remarkably human. I cannot say with certainty that this was the result of the performance as such.

Nevertheless, a few things come to mind that I wish to capture using words, so here we go.

The early Haydn string quartets pose a puzzle for modern quartets that try to play them: Despite what some Haydn scholars will tell you (including those quoted in the program notes for this concert), they can sound awfully thin to modern ears, with pure homophonic accompaniment in the other three instruments for the first violinist’s melodies. (In this case, the first violinist was Kyu-Young Kim; he and his sister, violinist Min-Young Kim, play tag team on the fiddlin’ positions. This is a lot harder to do with viola and cello, and Jessi and Raman Ramakrishnan wisely do not attempt it.) The timbre of modern instruments, fuller than the timbres of string instruments in Haydn's time, exacerbate the problem by calling more attention to what-all isn't there.

In Op. 20, no. 1, the quartet the Daedalus played, Haydn lets the cello free a little bit, especially in the first movement where it gets to state some thematic material and play gentle counterpoint to the higher voices. Mostly, though, the inner voices don’t have much to do. However, the rewards of these early string quartets are some really winsome slow movements with simple, direct lyricism, some fun moves in first-movement development sections, those wonderful Haydn minuets, and a profusion of appealing melodies throughout, so they’re worth any number of shots.

Kyu played much of his melodic material with subtle rhythmic freedom, establishing himself as the quasi-soloist, and Raman gave his contrasting material a few small emphases; the spontaneity unmoored Haydn’s music a little bit without ever letting it drift into foreign stylistic waters. Min and Jessi gave Kyu and Raman space for their inventions while following their rhythmic lead, making for an especially fun minuet and finale. The quartet’s default tone is so clean and warm that the grace and pathos of the slow movement seemed to blossom naturally from Haydn’s homophony, with the Daedalus serving as a vessel rather than an interpretative body: for some music, including this, the most cherished illusion.

Elliott Carter’s fifth string quartet depends for its musical material on the lack of such illusions; it is literally a deliberative work, in which five sharply contrasted sections – coruscating pizziati in one, glassy harmonics in another, combative stabs in a third – alternate with sections in which the players try out music from one or another section, make comments on what the other folks are playing, and sometimes just shout or whisper for no reason. Carter was inspired by the process of an ensemble learning a new piece of music by playing phrases and then breaking off to discuss them.

Kyu read from the headnote to Carter’s score to provide the audience with the preceding information, and all I can say is that in this performance the instrumental conversation would probably have been just as vivid even if he hadn’t. Carter uses contrasting textures, sounds, and affects to expressive ends here, with the occasional bit of melody thrown in only if it furthers such ends. During the middle sections, the viola (if I’m remembering correctly; it’s been nearly two weeks now) returned to one harmonic note like a sore tooth, while the second violin did the same with a stab that kept breaking up the conversation like a shouted profanity. In the sections played together, the near-constant interplay always generated heat, even in the otherworldly harmonics section. It’s music about communication that communicates, and the Daedalus demonstrated both a passionate commitment to the music itself and a keen understanding of its structure and materials.

Certainly Elliott Carter, who was in the audience and whose 96th birthday was the day after the concert, was pleased, for he stood to bask in the crowd’s applause and then hauled himself down to the stage to thank the quartet. Since I was in the front row and near the aisle down which he proceeded, I was about six feet from him when he shook the hands of the players. A message sounded unbidden, like a klaxon, in my head: “THAT’S ELLIOTT FREAKING CARTER! YOU ARE NOT WORTHY TO BE WITHIN TWO YARDS OF THIS MAN!” It was like seeing Michael Jordan to me. (It was way cooler than seeing Condi Rice, for example.) And to see MJ compliment the Daedalus on their game, to abuse this metaphor, was a happy sight indeed.

I’ve heard the Daedalus play three Beethoven quartets, even though I’ve only been to two of their concerts, and each of the performances has made me want to cry. (For Op. 135, the waterworks actually started.) This is not because the Daedalus does some great violence to my favorite composer, let me assure you; rather, Beethoven’s music is served exceptionally well by what I take to be the quartet’s strongest points – that warm, clear tone, their feel for structure, their ability to make interpretive decisions sound like natural outgrowths of the music, and above all the underlying humane gravity of their performances, the sense that they are in league with Beethoven in his struggles as he expresses them musically. The Harp Quartet, Op. 74, is not quite so strife-ridden as either Op. 135 or Op. 59, No. 2, and I must confess (as noted above) that at this point in the program I was a bit stunned from the sheer volume of sound coming at me and distracted by the other stuff that was going to happen that weekend. So I’m glad I don’t have to write a real review. But something did unfold in the slow movement that felt completely new to me, no matter how many times I've heard this quartet already, and I was moved.

I'm sure the Daedalus will play many other prestigious concert halls (hell, they're already scheduled to play many prestigious concert halls next year), and maybe I'll see those performances, but I know I'll remember this one.

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