concert review: Esmé Quartet

I heard this group two-and-a-half years ago, in their North American debut, at which time they consisted of four young women from Korea who had been studying in Germany. Now they consist of three of those women plus a man from Belgium, and they're not in Germany any more, they're right here in San Francisco, having all four been hired to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory, which is some six blocks down the street from the Herbst Theatre where both of these concerts were held.

At the previous concert they gave a stunningly effective performance of Dvořák's Op 106, a work which doesn't always come off that well. So how would they do this time with Schubert's G Major, which is one of the most lyrical quartets in the repertoire? Oh, one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss listening to this lengthy work: the combination of lyricism and drive was superb. Here: this is a very fine video of the previous Esmé lineup playing this work, and it will give you something of an idea.

I was particularly pleased with the forte outbursts in the first movement, which had the bite and drama one associates with Schubert's previous quartet, "Death and the Maiden," and by the fast rondo of the finale, which had the momentum of a waterwheel or of a snowball rolling unobstructed downhill: it was as if it was being driven by the force of gravity.

Yet even more remarkable, by the same standards, was the rest of the program. Mozart's D Major Quartet, K. 575, one of his late "Prussian" Quartets, rose above any routine Mozart scribbling with an elegant sense of gracefulness and an unending emphasis on the lyric flow. Astonishingly, the same thing was true of Ligeti's First, a tiresome collection of random 1950s avant-garde tricks strung together. No matter how gritty, fragmented, dissonant, or harsh the music, the Esmé players found that lyrical flow of a melodic line. It was an astonishingly graceful performance, unlike anything I've heard in this work before. It didn't make me like Ligeti any better, but it further cemented my admiration for Esmé.

For an encore, despite now being only 3/4 Korean, they played a piece of Korean folk music, which in its ceaseless presentation of bent note slides outdid even Ligeti in weird modernism.