BISQC, day 6

It rained all day in Banff on Saturday, but it hardly mattered, because except for rushing the short distances between the residence hall, concert hall, and dining hall, I was never outdoors. It was another marathon concert day at BISQC, with all ten contesting quartets playing fairly long sets, organized into three two-hour concerts.

The theme was "Schubert-plus." Each group played the first movement only of one of the great late-period Schubert quartets, and then filled the rest of their time - about 15 or 20 minutes - with whatever they wanted to play, free choice.

For the Schubert, six of the groups chose their opening movement from the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet in D Minor, and four from the G Major. "Death and the Maiden" is my favorite of all quartets, and the prospect of hearing six different performances of it in one day was thrilling. I was very happy.

But I didn't find much to choose between them, in interpretation. Some were a little more or less vehement in the fortes, some paused more or took quiet sections slower, but they were all in the same order, which was not true in any of the previous rounds. What was different was tone color, and here, quite surprisingly, the difference came with some of the groups being deficient. What the heck happened to the Eliot Quartet's second violinist? It sounded as if he'd traded his instrument in for a toy box. The Marmen, also, had some unplanned screeching. (The Marmen also, who played the G Major, were the only group of all ten to play the exposition repeat.) In the Elmire, the cello was for some reason very loud and prominent. I spent the whole piece listening just to that.

It was in the choices of repertoire for the rest of the round that the quartets really differed. The Ruisi played some fantasias by Purcell. Other listeners reported being bored by this, and Baroque music is not always exciting if you're used to listening to later periods, but I found it, as a change of pace, enormously refreshing. The Eliot played part of Prokofiev's Second Quartet, and in all the heavy and folkishly colorful fun sounds here, the weird second violin didn't stand out so much. The Ulysses played the Adagio from Shostakovich's Tenth Quartet and then an Andante by Pavel Haas (a Czech Holocaust victim). What most of the audience didn't know is that the slow movement of Shostakovich's Tenth doesn't come to a full stop; it flows right into the finale. So the Ulysses played it flowing right in to the Haas. Immediately it stopped sounding like Shostakovich, but at the end, though it was intermission, almost everybody just sat there waiting for the next piece.

I'd been hoping somebody would follow the opening movement of "Death and the Maiden" with the rest of the quartet. Nobody did, but the Callisto did something clever, which was to play the second, third, and fourth movement each from a different quartet: Ades, Bartok, and Ravel.

Naturally, there had to be some worthless modernist crap. This came from the two composers I'd never heard of, and now I know why I'd never heard of them. On the giant map of worthless modernist crap, I'd previously identified the stuff that sounds like bees buzzing, like cars honking, and like people moving furniture around. Now I've heard Salvatore Sciarrino (from Marmen), who sounds like seagulls squawking (other listeners described it as more like cats fighting), and Wolfgang Rihm (from Agate), who sounds like the signal from a radio station you can't get.

It's not just the sound quality that makes this stuff bad, but the sense that it's just miscellaneous noodling that doesn't add up to anything. By contrast, the other severe modernist offerings, even if I didn't care for them, were incisive, well-constructed, and meaningful-sounding. This applied to the Schnittke and Auerbach from Vera (strange, I remember hearing Auerbach I liked better than that), and even the Webern and Kurtag - two composers I'm normally happy to deprecate - from the Omer. But the two complete modern works on the program were far better than that. The Elmire did an outstanding job with Dutilleux's Ainsi la nuit, the best performance of anything by Dutilleux I've heard yet, and the Viano were almost beyond brilliant in Ades's The Four Quarters.

After the last concert, instead of heading down to the computers to write this entry, I headed towards the bar to hang out and discuss what we'd heard with other listeners, and wait for the announcement of the three finalists. The director stepped up to a microphone about an hour and a half later, and named, in alphabetical order: Callisto. Marmen. Viano.

Well. To my tastes, they all did some good stuff. I could have named three other groups that did just as well to my ears, but I could also have named three groups whose appearance as the finalists would have caused me to say, "Gee, I dunno."

I'll have more to say after the final concert Sunday afternoon - they're each playing a big middle or late quartet by Beethoven (chosen in advance, and fortunately no two of them chose the same work) - and the announcement of the grand prize winner.