concert review: Poiesis Quartet

The Poiesis Quartet are the young ensemble who won first prize at this year's Banff International String Quartet Competition. I watched the whole competition on video broadcast and was deeply impressed by this ensemble. So I couldn't miss the opportunity to hear them in person, in the Noe Music series in a small but acoustically and aesthetically impressive neighborhood church in San Francisco. And one reason this small local series was able to nab the Banff winner, a hot ticket as classical ensembles go, is that they'd booked them before Banff. So, great perspicacity on the part of the Noe director-programmers.

Poiesis will occasionally play a "classic," but they're dedicated to more modern music, especially recent work. Their program included four contemporary works, all completed within the last 12 years, and the two most recent of which they commissioned themselves. They'd played all four* at Banff, but the experience of hearing them over an electronic connection on that occasion paled against the vivid, arresting quality of hearing them live now. This was the kind of playing where it was easy to tell how great the players are even without knowing the music well enough to evaluate it.

The four pieces had distinct individual styles, but there was a general family resemblance between them: excursions into lyrical tonality were separated by complex querulous sections without the grinding dissonance that once would have been obligatory in such works; plenty of exclamations of the kind of startling metallic effects (ponticello was a favorite) typical in the quartets of Bartók or Janáček, whom I think must be the patron saints of the composers represented here - that is to say, the composers seemed to be thinking, "Those are the kind of quartets I want to write."

To finish up, a modern quartet that's on the verge of hoary classic status, Prokofiev's Second. This was played with a firm, compelling hand that got across this rather difficult piece - I've rarely heard a satisfactory performance - more coherently and winningly than other renditions. Another big winner.

At Banff, it's not done for performers to speak to the audience during concerts. Here, all four players took turns introducing the various works. That too is unusual; if there's introductions to be made, usually one player does all the talking.

I'm so pleased that I was able to haul myself up to the City for this one.


*Pisachi by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate; String Quartet by Brian Raphael Nabors; String Quartet No. 7 by Kevin Lau; and Many, Many Cadences by Sky Macklay.