concert review: Jerusalem Quartet

Joshua Kosman, retired newspaper reviewer who's now blogging, is "at the moment struggling to imagine what purpose is served by going to concerts, listening to music, and thinking and writing about it" in our new authoritarian reality.

I look at it differently. I see music as a refuge, a - not a "comfort," that's too facile - but a means for healing and enriching the soul. Even music that's dissonant can do that. That's why I posted a link to A Child of Our Time on Wednesday, and that I think is the point of having any form of art at all.

Which is why I went with cheerful anticipation to this concert by a string quartet group I knew nothing about. They're four men from Israel, a country whose exports some would prefer to boycott, though how avoiding its cultural features would help the people in Gaza is not clear to me. Perhaps it's just to chide the entire country for having an obnoxious government, though if that's the motive then come January I'd have to start boycotting myself, and I'm not sure how I would do that.

So I just ignored that point. This concert ought to have been in Herbst, but there was a scheduling conflict after the performers had to change their date, so it was moved to the large(r of the) halls at the San Francisco Conservatory down the street, a much better venue than it looks. They played Haydn's Op 50/1, a lively piece, Dvorak's Op 106, an expansive one, and Shostakovich's Twelfth. Shostakovich's Twelfth is in D-flat major, an insane key to write for strings in, but I think Shostakovich had a plan, if he lived long enough (which he didn't), to write a string quartet in each key, like The Well-Tempered Clavier. As for why this one, apparently the Jerusalem Quartet is working its way through a Shostakovich cycle, and this was just the Twelfth's turn to come up.

This is the work which begins with an attempt to write twelve-tone music, but soon enough the composer gives it up and goes back to writing like Shostakovich. It was at this point that it became crystal clear what the Jerusalem Quartet is good for, and that's for playing fast loud passages in unison. They simply burn the carpet. Something similar had been revealed in the Haydn, not in unison but in a quick forte exchange, where despite the quartet's serious mien they passed the phrases around with the vim and vigor of children playing with a ball.

And so it was a pretty good concert, and I preceded it with trying out for dinner a nearby Burmese restaurant (hey, this is San Francisco - we have every national culture in the world) of some reputation, where I had Strange Catfish (not its name, but should have been).