
|
Ebène Quartet
Rigor in action, from Mozart to Miles
April 16, 2013
A few minutes before the Ebène Quartet began
playing a superb concert on April 14, a subscriber and a
board member of the sponsoring San Antonio Chamber Music
Society conducted a frank exchange of views in the Temple
Beth-El lobby.
Their discussion concerned the propriety of the program’s
second half, described as “Jazz and Pop Standards,
re-imagined by the Ebène Quartet.” The subscriber
fervently hoped the fall from classical graces would not
portend a trend.
I confess some suspicions of my own, but they were dispelled
by the outsized intelligence, fierce discipline and
untethered curiosity the French troupe applied to the
more-traditional first half, which comprised Mozart’s sunny
Quartet in C (“Dissonant”), K. 465 , and Felix Mendelssohn’s
dark Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80. It was clear from these
performances that the Ebène was constitutionally
incapable of anything cheap.
That impression was confirmed by the “re-imagined”
jazz and pop standards themselves, but first let’s address
the two classical standards. The Ebène Quartet
re-imagined those, too, in a sense: The performance of
neither work seemed to have been governed by any
preconceptions about “Mozartean” or “Mendelssohnian” -- or
even “classical” or “Romantic” -- style. The touchstone in
each case seemed to be the score itself and the players’
fresh, unprejudiced investigation into what the score meant
and why.
In Mozart, the troupe favored a minimal, very narrow vibrato
and a lithe approach to phrasing that kept the textures
light and clear. In the Mendelssohn, a powerful work
expressing the composer’s grief over the death of his older
sister Fanny, a general lightness of texture served to
emphasize by contrast the outbursts of anger and
breast-beating grief.
These were rigorous performances, exceptionally
well-planned, intensively prepared, with taut ensemble and
exquisite chordings. But it was the kind of rigor that
conceals rigor. Every moment of the Mozart, especially,
seemed fresh and alive and surprising. The music sounded
less abstract than usual, less a settled object of
reverence, and nearer to our own contemporary sensibility.
From the printed program’s bare description of the second
half, one might surmise that it was an example of
“crossover,” that pandering genre which is disdained equally
by the partisans of classical and pop music alike.
The Ebène’s “re-imaginings” were not
crossover. They were artistically ambitious, complex,
vibrant works that stood on their own merits, but that
borrowed familiar pop and jazz tunes as thematic
material. The recompositions (not mere arrangements)
were group efforts by the quartet’s players -- violinists
Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadore, violist Mathieu
Herzog, cellist Raphael Merlin -- but they were far more
unified than one might expect from committee work.
John Lennon’s “Come Together” germinated a piece that
sounded as though it could have been written by Bela Bartok
-- whose use of Hungarian folk material and idioms was not
so very different from the Ebène’s approach to its
“re-imaginings.” Often, the pieces employed jazz,
blues and pop techniques along with a wide spectrum of
modern classical techniques -- wonderful sliding notes in
“Misirlou,” the Greek folk song; elaborate violin solos that
sounded like jazz improvisations in Miles Davis’s “All
Blues” and Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints.” Erroll Garner’s
“Misty” opened with a long cello solo that incorporated jazz
and blues inflections, but which was also informed by the
Bach cello suites. Eden Ahbez’s “Nature Boy” got a thorough
deconstruction and reconstruction. Astor Piazzolla’s
“Libertango” opened with glassy high harmonics that owed as
much to Darmstadt as to Buenos Aires.
Mike Greenberg
|


|