Pasa Reviews The Miró String Quartet
Miró String Quartet St. Francis Auditorium, Jan. 13
Santa Fe Pro Musica launched its annual stringquartet series last Sunday by hosting the Miró String Quartet in a program with a twist. Rather than offer a lineup of imposing masterworks, the foursome presented what it called a “Quartet Cabaret,” a playlist dominated by short, easily assimilated pieces, with each of the players interspersing banter intended to inform and amuse. It was a winning idea, and the result almost offset the inescapable fact that the Miró lacked a distinct sonic or interpretative profile.
The group’s musical character was defined almost throughout by uncomfortably shrill first-violin tone (even on the instrument’s lower strings), iffy ensemble intonation, melodic phrasing destabilized by arbitrary stresses, and accompanimental figures that often simply thumped along. That’s not to say that the Miró is substandard. It is, in fact, unconditionally standard. But in this golden age of quartet-playing, one might rightfully wish for a higher norm from a group that has been in existence for 23 years.
Still, the choice of repertoire was fun. Following the opening item, Schubert’s C-minor Quartettsatz, the group played the 41-measure sketch Schubert slugged out for an ensuing movement. Though the composer had obviously not refined his draft, it was fascinating to hear, and concertgoers will probably never encounter it again. A touch of modernity came from Michael Ippolito’s Big Sky, Low Horizon, inspired by an Ansel Adams photograph and written as a wedding present for a friend — again, a piece one would not often confront. It provided an opportunity for the group to buzz energetically in parallel rhythms.
Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade and Giacomo Puccini’s Crisantemi buttressed what the players called the operatic portion of the recital, the former because it traces a brief dramatic narrative, the latter because — well, it’s by Puccini. Given the context, it was strange that the spoken remarks about Crisantemi failed to note that Puccini incorporated this very music into his opera Manon Lescaut. Although the musicians repeatedly alluded to the broad expressive possibilities residing in these “operatic” scores, their interpretations proved short on personality. In other hands, the Italian Serenade can be wry or even hilarious; here, it was blandly literal. Puccini wrote Crisantemi to mourn the passing of an Italian aristocrat, and it can prove heart-rending. Here, the ensemble didn’t allow itself the rhythmic freedom needed to weep.
More successful were three of Dvoˇrák’s dozen quartet pieces collected under the name Cypresses, each one preceded by the recitation of the poem that inspired it. The one Dvoˇrák placed ninth in his set was a highlight thanks to its prominent viola part, excellently rendered, and the instruction that all the instruments install mutes, which tempered the stridency that was problematic elsewhere.
Two Beethoven works were relatively big entries in the concert. His Serioso Quartet (Op. 95) received a respectable, mainstream run-through. Like much of the group’s commentary, the patter about this piece was puzzling, claiming that the composer wrote it for friends and never wanted it to be played in public. (So why did he publish it, and why was it performed repeatedly in his lifetime?) Similarly, about his Grosse
Fuge (Op. 133), which concluded the recital, we were informed that Beethoven defended it to his publisher by saying he had composed it for a later age. In fact, he famously said that two decades earlier, to a violinist, justifying his Op. 59 Quartets. In the Miró’s performance of this radical piece, any pretense to finesse was thrown to the winds.