We were happy to meet again, Tuesday at the Bourgie Hall, the Dover Quartet which had greatly impressed us in 2017 during its Beethovenian performances at the Chamber Music Festival. The reunion was largely up to expectations.
How lucky are we to have been able to hear the Jerusalem Quartet and the Dover Quartet in the space of a week? With the Danish Quartet, the Takács and undoubtedly one or two other ensembles we are in the presence of the current world nectar of the discipline, knowing that the Pražák are in reconstruction and the Artemis on hiatus.
Fugue and quartet
As interesting as it is to evoke a parallel at the highest level with the Jerusalem, as it is eloquent to learn from the succession of the Cremona Quartet, Sunday at the Ladies’Morning, and the Dover, Tuesday. The Cremona Quartet had played The art of running away, a building which would have held only by an absolute balance of lines and forces.
In fact, Bach’s supreme art of performance and the quintessential quartet art converge on the same notion: the balance of power. The Cremona Quartet in Bach was rickety because the first violin was louder than the second, which was more biting than the cellist, who played more confidently than the violist.
With the Dover Quartet this question does not arise. The first violin, Joel Link, is worthy of a great soloist with a string of ground nourished in the last sentence of Zemlinsky’s 3rd movement, a G string that we also find radiating in Brahms’ 2nd movement. But, on the other side of the stage, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt is just as present and intense. The concert spectators will be able to compare a posteriori the warm sound material of his interventions in the Final by Brahms with the icy color of the so-called “reference” recording of the Alban Berg Quartet. Besides, Bryan Lee’s mimicry (2nd violin) with his counterpart in Brahms 1st movement was exceptional and cellist Camden Shaw brought his musical touches with apparent detachment but a lot of seriousness.
Zemlinsky and León
The “Dover Paw” is the mellowness of sound, a “grain” which, as we have said previously, makes it the Guarneri Quartet of the 21st century. This sound grain is modulated with infinite flexibility and an unsuspected palette of halftones. This is, for example, the advantage of the Dover over another excellent contemporary quartet, the Belcea, in the 3rd movement of the Quartet op. 51 n ° 2 by Brahms.
the 1st Quartet de Zemlinsky is ideally chosen as a pairing with Brahms, which he precedes in the program but continues in the spirit. With the Dover, the strength and power of ” kräftig Of the 3rd movement become devastating. Compared to the famous version of the LaSalle, this is also the sound quality that gives the Dover a clear added value.
As for the work of the American composer of Cuban origin Tania León (born in 1943), her Quartet n ° 2 of 2011 can be summed up by the idea of fragmentation (such is even the title of the rhythmically very difficult 3rd movement) or diffraction. When hearing the Cuban substrate thus pulverized by various and varied contemporary processes, we thought of Marcel Landowski. This cacique of French music from the 1960s to 1970s was played because he held positions of power. One could quite easily deconstruct the seemingly tortuous character of his music into very simple things, twisted to make them dissonant and “modern”. Once his power was lost, Landowski’s time passed very quickly and his process music was thrown into oblivion. The American-Cuban variation of the genre, 50 years later, will it meet a more enviable fate?