The Dover Quartet officially opened the Bougie Room season on Wednesday evening. This ensemble, which we praised in 2017 and 2021, has remained true to its reputation despite a major change in training.
It is quite improbable to have to write that the Dover Quartet has only been appearing in this formation since this month! Violist Julianne Lee joined the Quartet recently and it feels like she’s been there forever. She knows and anticipates the reflexes, nuances and accelerations of her friends and the dosage of her interventions is the right one. His tandem with cellist Camden Shaw in several places in Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 9 was impeccable.
New conformism
It is therefore a Dover Quartet of intact magic that we found again on Wednesday evening. The term magic is adapted from the Quartet op. 74 No. 3 by Haydn at the opening of the program. Very rare are ensembles of such beauty, cohesion and sonic power and this Quartet “The Rider” demonstrates this well, for example in the unity of the attack of the 2nd movement and in the management of the nuances of this Largo assai. The features fuse in the 3rd movement, but it is the Finalallegro con brio, which stuns us with its virtuosity (Joel Link’s violin seems to be throwing fireworks) and its unity, even in the most disheveled moments.
Follows the 1st Quartet by Florence Price, a rather monochrome painful lament, much less schematic than the symphonies, which follow a sort of framework, and more tense on the harmonic level. But, very quickly, not much remains of the audition and one wonders why such an eminent quartet invests itself in such secondary music.
There is a moment not so long ago when the desire to open up the repertoire through diversity will become a new rectitude, a form of conformism like any other, which will only result in one thing: impoverishing the quality of the content propose. The Dover Quartet of 2021 was no better, with a work by Tania León. So much talent wasted for not much… We could almost write: “QED”.
Things changed, obviously, in the second part with the 9th Quartet by Shostakovich, cemented, here too, by a more than remarkable sound density, concentration and expressive intensity. The visceral ardor of the Scherzo, the multiple facets of Final were rendered with an authority, an accuracy of intonation and collective play that can be a model.
The new era of the Bougie room, led by Caroline Louis and Olivier Godin, has started well and there is no doubt that we will have several evenings of this level this season.