concert review: Borromeo Quartet

Borromeo Qt. L to R: Yeesun Kim, vc; Kristopher Tong, 2v; Melissa Reardon, va; Nicholas Kitchen, 1v

Sunday evening I went up to Kohl Mansion to hear the Borromeo Quartet in the first concert of the chamber music season in their magnificent Great Hall, a sort of drawing room on which a platform has been placed on the mid side, so that people in all the chairs surrounding it can see; there's no trouble with hearing. In fact, the acoustics are stunning, which brought particular vividness to this particular performance.

This was an exceedingly serious string quartet concert. The repertoire had its lighter moments - Beethoven's Op. 135 is often seen as a reversion to his clever Haydnesque youth with the greater perspective of maturity; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae Quartet has a couple of lighter and bouncier movements. But they didn't come out that way this time. Nor did the darker portions - the slow movements of both works are potentially emotionally intense, but they had a much drier interpretation here.

The Borromeo Quartet play with a hard crispness that's really best suited for the high modernist 20th century repertoire. They're known for their penetrating Bartok, and I'd be fascinated by what they could make out of Shostakovich. But when they play Romantic or Classical works with that style, it makes the music feel high modernist even if it doesn't actually sound anything like it. They have sprightliness and clarity, but only at a couple small moments - notably the pizzicato moment that almost concludes the Beethoven - was there even a trace of the lightness or wit inherent in the music. They have awesome drive and exactness of control, which expressed itself most clearly in the finales. Beethoven's had some agonizing drama until it faded away; and instead of being a frantic dance, the finale of the Sibelius was a machine of vehement power bearing down on us and nearly crushing the life out of its hearers.

I have to count this a great performance within a certain very limited perspective of interpretation. It was certainly an impressive thing to listen to.

There was a little more to the concert than that. One of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier prelude and fugue sets, arranged for quartet. Evidently the fugue has only three lines, because that's the number of performers playing at once throughout it. And Remember by Eleanor Alberga, three minutes of wistful chordal lament. A fairly succinct program.