Juilliard String Quartet keeps evolving
The acclaimed Juilliard String Quartet will conclude its residency at Arizona State University on Friday, April 12, with a concert of Stravinsky’s fast and brief “Three Pieces for String Quartet,” Janacek’s rich, dark and beautiful “Kreutzer Sonata” and Beethoven’s mixed-tempo Opus 130.
The performance at ASU Katzin Concert Hall will be one of the final concerts with the quartet for violist Samuel Rhodes, who has been with the group for 42 years.
The Juilliard String Quartet, which won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, began their residency last fall. The concert marks their third appearance at ASU during the 2012-13 school year.
“Over the course of our two previous appearances, we have done a fair number of master classes,” said Ronald Copes, the quartet’s violinist since 1997. “We read through composers’ Joseph Lin, who came onboard in 2011. The quartet’s cellist, Joel Krosnick, has been with the group since 1974.
“In any change of personnel in a quartet, if it is done carefully and well-considered — and, certainly, choosing Joseph was both of those — you find a person who has similar ideas about music making as the three remaining members, but with a distinct point of view,” Copes said. “That helps create a new evolution of the voice of the quartet. The process helps us because it prevents our interpretations of the classic repertoire from becoming, ‘Well, this is the way we do it.’ Instead, we rediscover how we do it.”
The upcoming performance at ASU will be one of the final concerts for Rhodes, who will be replaced in September by Roger Tapping.
“A few weeks ago, we performed a program in Philadelphia and New York that involved Sam and his replacement, Roger Tapping,” Copes said. “The second piece was a viola quintet that Sam wrote for the Juilliard String Quartet. Roger played the first viola part and Sam played the second viola part. It was a fantastic program and a wonderful tribute.
“The last concert that Sam will do with us, the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, will be the same program.”
The middle piece of the ASU program, Janacek’s “The Kruetzer Sonata,” is based on a controversial 1889 book by Leo Tolstoy that hinges on the romantic sonata for violin and piano written by Beethoven in 1805.
“Tolstoy wrote a novel- la called ‘The Kreutzer Sonata,’ which is a very dark work having to do with an admission by a man to a complete stranger that he had found his wife, a pianist, and a man, a violinist, playing ‘The Kreutzer Sonata,’ ” Copes said. “He got extremely jealous of the implied intimacy. He murdered her.
“Janacek used this as a psychological basis for this string quartet.”