concert review: Miró Quartet

The Miró Quartet was previously heard by me at the Music@Menlo summer festival back in 2005, when they played four of Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets at one concert. Now they returned, with one member different, to open Menlo's winter season with a standard string quartet recital at the Spieker Center on the Menlo School campus last Saturday.

The Miró have a firm and somewhat gritty, but clear, straightforward, and above all pliant style. Their Haydn sounds like Haydn, and their Debussy sounds like Debussy. (Not everyone does this.) Haydn's Op. 77 No. 1 in G, one of his very last quartets, was fast, chipper, matter-of-fact, and suffused with a humorous geniality, just as it should be. The clarity making all the lines audible was gratifying and impressively balanced.

Debussy's Quartet (he only wrote the one) exposed those impressionist harmonies without wallowing in them. That gritty foundation was vital here in keeping the music grounded and focused on the melodic motifs and the interplay of the instruments. The result was that I have never heard a performance of Debussy's scherzo that so demonstrated a stylistic resemblance and similarity of purpose with the one in Ravel's Quartet. Debussy and Ravel are usually classed together, though not by me. (I see Debussy as more like Delius, and Ravel more resembling Respighi.) But this time I agree, they go together.

And in between, a piece the Miró commissioned several years ago from the ubiquitous (at least if you go to the Cabrillo Festival he is) Kevin Puts, titled Home. Inspired by the 2015 refugees from the Middle East, this piece is about leaving home and then, I guess, returning. It begins with several minutes of a rocking motif in thick, variable, but consonant harmony. That's "home." Then it goes chaotic, or at least as chaotic as the sober, straightlaced Puts can manage. Pointillism, grinding tuttis, glissando runs, and chromatic scales are all tried out momentarily, though nothing goes really wild. When it returns to the opening, it's a rougher, more astringent consonance. It's all earnestly played by the Miró four.

Some quartets open their program with Haydn to be dull and dutiful. Not this one. Here the Haydn was the treat of the program. But Debussy and Puts also received careful attention from this impressive ensemble.