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Miró Quartet
Vox populi
January 31, 2013
OK, so I’m no Nate Silver,
but I did accurately predict more than half the races in the
Jan. 27 vote. Three out of five, to be precise.
The Miró Quartet, returning to town for the San
Antonio Chamber Music Society concert series at Temple
Beth-El, opened its program with an exquisitely refined
account of Johannes Brahms’s Quartet in C Minor and then let
the audience pick the works for the second half, dubbed
“Quartet à la carte.”
The troupe, founded in 1995 at the Oberlin Conservatory, has
been faculty string quartet in residence at the University
of Texas at Austin since 2003. Its current members are
violinists Daniel Ching and William Fedkenheuer, violist
John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele. All made superb
impressions in their San Antonio concert, both as
individuals and as a team.
The “Quartet à la
carte” ballot presented five races, with three
options for each. I figured the audience would choose the
most conservative or familiar item in each race. The vote
met my expectations in choosing Franz Schubert’s
“Quartettsatz”; the menuetto from Mozart’s Quartet in
E-flat, K. 428; and the finale from Antonin Dvorak’s
“American” quartet. (Remember Dvorak had made several trips
to Iowa, doubtless in order to plan his ground game for the
caucuses.)
The voters fooled me, however, by choosing Giacomo Puccini’s
lovely, elegiacal “Crisantemi” over Samuel Barber’s lovely,
elegiacal adagio from the string quartet in B minor (the
“Adagio for Strings”). I was also surprised by the choice
for the closer. I’d expected Jacob Gade’s tango “Jalousie”
to win, but the audience chose Ervin T. Rouse’s “Orange
Blossom Special” in a delightful parody arrangement by Mr.
Fedkenheuer. Then, by voice vote, the audience rejected
“Jalousie” again in favor of Mr. Fedkenheuer’s arrangement
of Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell.”
Democracy has its virtues,
and its limitations. The concert would have been
considerably more valuable if the Miró had stuffed
the ballot box and played a movement from Kevin Puts’s
“Credo,” given its premiere by this troupe in 2007. I’ve
heard only a couple of excerpts from the piece on YouTube,
but those fragments were fascinating -- dark, intense,
disturbed, rhythmically propulsive. Other unjustly rejected
candidates included Hugo Wolf’s “Italian Serenade” and a
movement from Henri Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit.”
The performances tended to gestural restraint, silken tone,
impeccable intonation, ideal balances and total unity. The
outer allegros of the Brahms quartet may have wanted a
little more energy, but perfectly gauged, transparent
chordings and beautifully sustained lyrical lines made the
middle movements luminous. Puccini’s “Crisantemi” has seldom
sounded so gorgeous, or so moving. The Schubert and Dvorak
were on the cool side but with enough intensity and
liveliness of lines to serve the music well.
Mike Greenberg
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