St Lawrence String Quartet for Music Toronto. At the Jane Mallett Theatre. January 26.
Sometimes a recital is not just 90 minutes of music and a nice cup of spiked hot chocolate to end the evening.
We are collectively caught in that old Chinese curse of living in interesting times. For years, I thought the interesting times meant the migration of our ways of communicating and exchanging information to a variety of digital platforms. Now I’m realizing that the interesting times concern the very basis of our culture. Rooted in the great project of the Enlightenment (where how we relate to our cosmos passed from one of mystical explanation to one of rational analysis and understanding), Western culture has come to a proverbial fork in the road. Or maybe it’s a knife. The forces of reason, entrenched and in control since the dawn of the Industrial Age, and forging ahead unrelentingly in the Digital Age, are being confronted by unreason, the irrational, emotionalism, perhaps even a degree of nihilism. Both have coexisted relatively peacefully until now. But over the past decade or so, we’ve seen what we rationalists perceive to be the Dark Side slowly move from lurking at the margins of our culture to being the great, untamed beast in the middle of the living room, or art gallery or, most recently, the centre of our political lives.
Is this a temporary, inevitable setback for the rationally organized, better-for-all World of Tomorrow, fuelled by the inevitable discontent bred by rapid social and economic change? Or is this the beginning of an epic struggle to throw the civilizing ideals of the past four centuries out the window?
What on earth does this have to do with the St Lawrence String Quartet giving their annual recital for Music Toronto at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Thursday night? This is chamber music, for heaven’s sake, ideally a refuge from the hurly-burly of political Trumpery and whatever anxieties are gnawing at our brains before the concert starts.
Maybe so, but it struck me that this little recital represented a coherent answer to all the reason-embracing people looking for a way to deal with the discontent of our times: serious music carries in its very nature the kernels of order and chaos, of reason and emotion. It provides a form in which to channel joy as well as sorrow, and the full gamut of other emotions. Without channels, we are condemned to wander the streets looking for someone to blame, for a way to vent, for a way out.
Music Toronto has, for its entire history, been a bastion of serious music making. There are no concessions to popular taste here. No celebrity guests to gild the marquee. No gimmicks to make the presentation more accessible to the uninitiated. There are no Twitter teasers to catch flittering attention spans. You sit. They play. We listen – attentively, analytically, appreciatively, silently.
One of the hallmarks of the Canadian-born, Stanford University-based St Lawrence String Quartet is that they always approach their interpretations with passion. It has made for many electric live performances and recordings over their now-27-year career.
Violinists Geoff Nuttall and Owen Dalby (a recent recruit from the Bay Area), violist Lesley Robertson, and cellist Christopher Costanza brought a program that wore its balance of emotion and intellect proudly, bookended by two Op. 20 (E-flat Major, No. 1, and F minor, No. 5) late-18th-century string quartets by the founding master of the genre: Joseph Haydn. The sandwich filling was Leos Janacek’s well-loved “Kreutzer Sonata” String Quartet No. 1, and Swallow (String Quartet No. 4) commissioned by the Lawrences from Stanford-based composer Jonathan Berger for their 25th anniversary season.
All four of the string quartets represented on Thursday night are first and foremost studies in form. The musical idioms are, of course, completely different. But the composer is thinking first and foremost, seeing how he can set up specific patterns and then play with them. It is no coincidence that the most emotional period in classical music writing, the Romantic era of the 19th century, was not represented on the program. But that also didn’t mean that emotional expression wasn’t accounted for.
I’ve spent years wondering how much Haydn’s music, so elegantly and intelligently written, frequently leavened by humour, has never had the same level of mainstream appeal as Mozart’s. But the string quartets are revered, for good reason. They are gems of musical craft.
As always, the Lawrences did a wonderful job of carefully following Haydn’s plan, while adding just enough tension and dynamic texture to really bring the music to life. Janacek’s intense work is profoundly emotional, but the structure is paramount. Here, too, the performers nimbly navigated the tightrope between control and extravagant gestures. It was an edge-of-the-seat experience of the best possible sort.
Berger is a hyper-intellectual being, spending as much time analyzing the arcana of musical structure and perception as he does writing music. His layering of motif and rhythm in Swallow is masterful. But here, too, it is the exercise of how sounds were assembled and organized into this piece of music – and how we can decode this for our own ears – that is paramount. True to form, the Lawrences dug into their instruments, bringing out a taut, magnetic, balanced reading. The Lento movement was particularly affecting, as it wove the instruments together into an almost meditative state.
The capacity audience duly acknowledged the Lawrences’ artistry and dedication. It was a fine night for both the intellect and the soul. We could feel safe, reassured that in recitals like these, we have a safe haven from the vicissitudes of alternate facts and competing truths. Perhaps, with fine performers like these, we can go out into the wider world and make an even stronger case for serious art music.
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