Dover Quartet's new violist and her colleagues have artistry shaped by Curtis

By Jay Harvey

February 27, 2024

Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, long among the most prestigious American conservatories for advanced musical education, generated the Dover Quartet, which comes to Indianapolis March 13 under the auspices of the Ensemble Music Society.  (The 7:30 p.m. concert, with music by Turina, Schubert, and Janacek, is at the Indiana History Center.)

A few years before the quartet's formation in 2008, Julianne Lee had graduated with a double major in violin and viola. She launched her career as an orchestra player, becoming a first-desk violinist in the Boston Symphony and the Boston Pops orchestras. 

At the beginning of the current school year, she renewed her Curtis connection again as the Dover's new violist. Her new colleagues are Curtis-educated founders of the ensemble, whose Indianapolis appearances go back to 2019. The Dovers have a residency at Curtis, a teaching and performing home base from which they go on tours of the kind that will bring them here.

Dover Quartet on the move: Camden Shaw, Julianne Lee, Bryan Lee, and Joel Link.

Founded a century ago by Mary Louise Curtis Bok, daughter of music patron and magazine and newspaper publisher Cyrus H.K. Curtis, the Curtis Institute has a nearly unique free tuition policy for students. They often fulfill their youthful promise by going on to distinguished careers. 

Institutionalized opportunities to broaden student development had a life-changing benefit for Lee. A violinist from early childhood, growing up in a Korean family with two cellists as family members, she was receptive to expanding her horizons in the string family, too. She learned as a Curtis junior of a program that would permit a double major in violin and viola. Borrowing an instrument from the school to get started, she was able to land instruction from a distinguished teacher, Joseph de Pasquale.

"They are so supportive of the students," Julianne Lee marvels. "Learning the alto clef was the hardest part of it," she admitted. "The sound was already in my ear — the low register."

Of the Curtis influence on her new professional status, Lee told me by phone: "I think that there's something there. Joel and Bryan's teachers have been my teachers as well. How we heard music was similar. You play what you hear, so I think we hear the same way. It's no exaggeration that it felt easy with them from the first minute." 

Lee's audition went so smoothly that she was practically a shoo-in for the quartet's viola vacancy last year. As Dover cellist Camden Shaw told Strings magazine: "... when we first read with her, it was clear that her voice, as it were, came through with such clarity that we fell in love with the musician beyond the specific viola.."

With such a close working relationship, specific musical and educational affinities don't tell the whole story. "Another thing we have in common [besides Curtis] is that we are the youngest child in our families," she said. "So we have stories we exchange and even discussions about that." 

She sums them up as "little personality things" about growing up as the "baby" of a family. Together with her love of travel and and a lifelong passion for chamber music, which she was able indulge while holding down orchestra positions, there seems to be a host of ways to count how thoroughly Julianne Lee belongs in the Dover Quartet's viola chair.

Strong in the tradition, embracing the new: Isidore String Quartet plays Haydn, Beethoven, Childs

By Jay Harvey

November 30, 2023

Rarely does an encore confirm with such insight a performer's artistry as in Wednesday's debut appearance here of the Isidore String Quartet under Ensemble Music Society auspices. You could see the value in how the group uses the first fugue in J.S. Bach's "Art of Fugue" as a way to reconnect in rehearsal with its characteristic identity and in sound checks before concerts. (It must be a successful habit: The Isidore this year won an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and last year the Banff International String Quartet competition in Canada.)

Isidore Quartet

That's the rationale that cellist Joshua McClendon offered the capacity audience at the Indiana History Center. The successive entries of the four instruments (which is also the arrangement used by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in a controversial recorded orchestration of Bach's final work) prioritizes mutual listening from the first note onward in each line. Also, the focus on minimal vibrato that has come to be universal practice in Bach performance was elaborately sustained in the program's major work, Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor, op. 132.

Resting on the historic fulcrum of its third movement, the work memorializes Beethoven's struggle with illness as he composed it in the mid-1820s. The anxiety occasioned by poor health and the struggle toward recovery, crowned by pious thanksgiving, suggests that the restraint should be projected non vibrato. The score has the direction sotto voce at the start (a musical direction that is known in English-language theater as "stage whisper"). The Isidore used that intimate direction as a guide to the whole movement. That non vibrato requires extraordinary efforts to synchronize tuning and balance, without vibrato's usual aid of widening the amplitude of the pitch to resolve any wavering and then toward unified intonation.

Achieving that, along with first-class unanimity of tempo and phrasing, made the Isidore's interpretation moving and capable of sustaining the audience's interest and absolute attention. The other four movements amounted to much more than a framework for the Molto adagio - Andante ("Heiliger Dankgesang").The Isidore's gift for embracing variety and knitting it into a cohesive whole was immediately evident in the way it handled the divided nature of the opening movement and its balance of two contrasting themes.

This expanse of expressiveness had been exercised in a piece by Beethoven's most influential predecessor when the program opened with Haydn's Quartet in C major, op. 20, no. 2. This ensemble's performance maximized question-and-answer aspects of the music, or, to use a later formulation of musical dialogue, call-and-response.

It was evident that the breadth of nuance the Isidore commands allows it to give a firm, unified account of the softest side of the dynamic spectrum. That comes to the fore here in the composer's more explicit use of the sotto voce direction: in the finale, the "stage-whisper" level becomes nearly unbearable in music that delays its climax until near the end. These musicians were certainly up to the mark in the delayed-gratification department. But the payoff was no less rewarding.

The contemporary work (a piece written for the Ying Quartet in 2012) was String Quartet No. 2 ("Awakening") by Billy Childs, a musician distinguished in both classical music (composition) and jazz (piano). The work has a distant link to Beethoven's op. 132 insofar as a health crisis and its positive resolution informs the whole.

The work's three movements detail the composer's journey from learning about his wife's pulmonary embolism ("Wake Up Call") through an agonizing wait once he'd reached the hospital ("The White Room") to the couple's coming to terms with the unsettling event and finding a new basis for their bond once the woman recovered ("Song of Healing"). Childs uses a range of extended techniques (extended from those available to the program's other two composers) to paint a picture of the three scenarios. The Isidore's performance showed its ability to master the independence of the four parts and come together creditably to show that even the greatest moments of stress can cohere in retrospect and be artistically transformed.

With lights blazing and words boiling, Kronos Quartet comes back to town under Ensemble Music auspices

By Jay Harvey

October 12, 2023

When I interviewed David Harrington before the Kronos Quartet's first Indianapolis appearance in 1989, he laid out the multimedia vision of the ensemble he had founded 16 years before: "Over the years we've added different kinds of theatrical elements — from light shows to singing robots," he told me for the Indianapolis Star. "That will definitely continue."

Kronos: Hank Dutt, John Sherba, David Harrington, Paul Wiancko

And so it has, with most of the expanse of a typically varied concert Wednesday night taken up by works with strong visual appeal, with a screen lowered into place and prerecorded spoken narrative. The host Ensemble Music Society changed venues with Butler University accommodating the move to the technically up-to-date Schrott Center for the Arts.

Kronos has adhered to different styles of musical presentation for 50 years, always anchored in a quest for new ways of connecting to its audiences. "We're looking for an evening of music that we feel gives our audience a sense of life," the first violinist told me in 1989 of the group, now comprising cellist Paul Wiancko in addition to original members Hank Dutt, viola, and John Sherba, second violin.

With the stage invitingly lit and all the technology required in place, the Quartet featured two substantial pieces in which the visual and narrative presentation was so rich as to almost overwhelm the music. It may be a peculiar liability, but worth admitting, that when there is a movie to watch, the accompanying music has difficulty registering with me. Even though my taste gravitates to music more than film, what I'm seeing is always more seductive than what I'm hearing. I would be an inept critic of film music.

Thus, with Nicole Lizee's "ZonelyHearts" and Mary Kouyoumdjian's "Silent Cranes," the comic, fantastic exuberance of the first one and the stark documentary heartbreak of the second dominated my impressions. The music followed contrasting styles, with Kronos' virtuosity as performers onscreen and onstage alike especially foregrounded in the Lizee piece.

The composer is a kind of magpie of popular culture in its advanced forms of shifting and overlapping imagery and narrative discontinuity. "The Twilight Zone," the Rod Serling TV show of sainted memory, is explicitly drawn upon to launch a disjointed story in which reality never rests on solid ground and perceptions in any given moment cannot be trusted. She clearly intends that what the audience processes will shift music itself to a subordinate place. Kronos itself is always at the center, however.

The surrealistic style also seems to draw upon the disorienting fiction of Donald Barthelme and the oblique paranoia and satirical thrust of Nathanael West (with Lizee's title inevitably evoking his novel "Miss Lonelyhearts"). The unreliable narrator has rarely been made the stuff of such spectacle in musical guise. The string quartet is swept into the unreliability: Their bows at one hilarious point go missing and the players work with paper-tube substitutes, getting a ghostly pallor of sound from their instruments.

"Silent Cranes" is a more orderly piece insofar as it steadily evokes the horrific disorder of the Armenian genocide of 1915, committed by Turks upon a minority community of great cultural antiquity and independence. To this day, Turkish wrath can be visited on anyone who dares to seek official acknowledgment of this crime.

With the projection design of Laurie Olinder, a parade of beautiful tapestries interspersed with group portraits of Armenians from the early 20th century gives way to blood-splotched images of maps and disturbing photos of slaughtered bodies and a field of skeletons. A series of recorded texts serving as epitaphs accompanies the work's last few minutes. I wish the music had impressed itself upon me as much as what I saw on the screen and heard from survivor testimonies.

One of the pieces of middle length also had a strong visual component: an anthology of black-and-white film clips, tracing from the viewpoint of determined black faces and marching feet the rise of the mass civil-rights movement in the South. Zachary James Watkins' 2017 "Peace Be Till" (an excerpt) allowed for contemplation of the live musical performance as the words of Martin Luther King Jr.'s counselor and close friend Dr. Clarence B. Jones were heard in his own voice.

The concert opened with the raucous energy of Osvaldo Golijov's arrangement of a Mexican song, "El Sinaloense" (The Man from Sinaloa), an imitation of the inebriated good cheer reflected in the original. The textures were cluttered and rhythmically propulsive.

The deftness of Kronos programming was assured in the choice of Gabriella Smith's "Keep Going," an upbeat representation of one woman's service to a songbird research project, in which the quartet mimicked birdsong with appropriate instruments, blended with their conventional ensemble. The larger significance of the work is reflected in narrative elements that offer the audience visions of how to save the world through individual effort combined toward a common goal.

The Watkins piece partnered aptly with Antonio Haskell's "God Shall Wipe All Tears Away," a tribute arranged by Jacob Garchik inspired by Mahalia Jackson. With the hushed, distant-sounding accompaniment of his colleagues, the violist ardently represented the devout vocalism of the Queen of Gospel, including her often delicately applied ornamentation.

Further outreach of the sort that Kronos has long stood for came after intermission. The visionary jazz bandleader Sun Ra, in an arrangement by the Gary composer Jlin, was placed by his work "Maji" in a good light shimmering with motoric energy. And the seminal pop star Laurie Anderson made an appearance, in another Garchik arrangement, with "Flow," an exercise in settled calm that made a worthy yet too slight prelude to the upsetting history lesson the audience received in "Silent Cranes."

As Harrington told me in February 1989, "It's hard for us to make a program these days. We're always excluding something." No wonder he says, in a short 50th-anniversary film shown just before the concert Wednesday, that he could live 500 years and never run out of new music worth submitting to Kronos treatment with his colleagues. It's easy to wish this trailblazing quartet more realistic longevity, which it already exemplifies.

Ensemble Music Society's delayed celebration of the 19th-amendment centennial worth waiting for

By Jay Harvey

Thursday, November 11, 2021

The fight for women's suffrage in the United States stretched out over decades, so it was fitting, if inconvenient, for there to have been a one-year delay in Ensemble Music Society's carefully planned centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment.

The right to vote for women, constitutionally guaranteed in 1920, had certifiable, if oblique, justification in the achievements of 19th-century American women in many fields. Among them was the prolific Amy Beach (1867-1944).  Long known as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach in deference to her husband, she had established a prodigious reputation in her youth as composer and pianist. A tireless advocate for publication and performance of her music in a male-dominated culture, she "leaned in" long before Sheryl Sandberg came up with the female self-help slogan. Beach's Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, op. 67, was the summit of Wednesday evening's thematic program, titled "19th Amendment Centennial Plus One," at the Indiana History Center .

With Lydia Artymiw at the piano, the  Cassatt String Quartet performed the work with mighty rapport and relentless commitment to its kaleidoscopic demands. Romantic effusiveness, solidly constructed a la Brahms, quickly characterizes the first movement, whose quiet ending makes an effective contrast. Beach's familiarity with French romanticism also seems evident, but the total escapes derivative dead ends.

The performers matched dynamics and phrasing outstandingly in the second movement, which featured a glorious outburst from the piano at the climax, setting up a lengthy denouement. All sorts of riches were scattered about the finale, starting with Ah Ling Leu's lovely playing of a viola melody and quickly flowering into a propulsively energetic ensemble, which ascended toward a fugal episode introducing a brilliant, sometimes suspenseful ending. The performance's rapturous reception by the large audience was both predictable and well-deserved.

The distinctive voices of the Cassatt got displayed in the first half, especially in the late Mozart string quartet, K. 559 in B-flat.  The group's attractive way of easing into the first movement was soon fused seamlessly into the more emotionally vivid body of the music. Elizabeth Anderson made the most of the cello's prominence in the Larghetto movement. Capricious independence of the instruments produced a unified effect in the third, with the slight exception of some challenging string-crossing passages for first violinist Muneko Otani. All four voices (the second violinist is Jennifer Leshnower) made sturdy contributions to the finale, in which the writing carries hints of an operatic vocal ensemble and even the kind of individuation found in madrigals. 

Composer Victoria Bond was on hand to lift the special quality of the women-focused program as her "Blue and Green Music" (2020) was performed. In remarks to the audience, Bond made it clear that Georgia O'Keeffe's painting of the same title was not only an inspiration but a kind of shaping force for her string quartet, a commission from Chamber Music America. The musical motifs identified with the two colors of the title are laid out in tandem in the opening movement. The middle movements take up each color in turn: "Green" is rambunctious, with dotted rhythms prevailing. Its spirit is turned into a different kind of drive in the finale, "Dancing Color," featuring lots of sprightly pizzicato and syncopation. I was unable to detect any traces in Bond of "Blue in Green," a beautiful number on Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," an all-time jazz bestseller. So color coordination between the works must be pure coincidence.

"Blue" is the slow movement, a kind of respite except for its gathering intensity. Its overlapping phrases wove an impressive tapestry, hinting at the way painters organize shades on their palettes. Particularly for this movement, I wished that a slide projection of the O'Keeffe painting had remained on the hall's lowered screen. It was distracting enough to sit through the hum of the screen being raised before the Cassatt could start playing. Normally I'm suspicious of any kind of visual accompaniment competing for attention with music, but in this case, it would have been an aid to understanding and enjoyment.

That aside, a kind of joy in the contributions — both creative and performing — of women to art music was evident both in what we heard and what we saw in this final Ensemble Music presentation of 2021. When the season resumes in January, may it already be evident that the pandemic has become no more than endemic — something to be cautious about but no longer able to severely hobble artistic activity around the world.

Harlem Quartet displays its breadth with a program of Schumann and contemporary Cuban works

By Jay Harvey

Thursday, October 21, 2021

The Harlem Quartet, with an assertive mission of expanding string-quartet repertoire and audiences, gave a bright, energetic sample of its work Wednesday night in a program divided between a romantic masterpiece and a group of new works by a guest pianist, brother of its first violinist.

Aldo Lopez-Gavilan writes music of florid surfaces and emotional depths. The five pieces that he and his string-quartet colleagues played after intermission at the Ensemble Music Society concert fill wide canvases with color and rhythm. Often they elaborate on repeated figures, resembling jazz improvisation over a hypnotic riff. The pulsating energy of dance music is never far from the surface.

Lopez-Gavilan's music often makes pictorial points, suggesting scoring for movies running only in the composer's mind. Such was the impression given by the first of the set that the ensemble offered a near-capacity audience at the Glick Indiana History Center. That was a musical cityscape of London, England, in its contemporary reality of ethnic diversity. Becoming familiar with the city's 21st-century neighborhoods, the  quartet began a multi-year residency in the British capital in 2018.

The pianist often provided himself with vigorous solo excursions, thickly harmonized and comprising lots of filigree of almost architectural heft and detail. That reached its apogee in the capricious finale "Pan con Timba" (translated for his hometown audience by cellist Felix Umansky, with the composer's help, as "Bread With Who-Knows?") 

Lopez-Gavilan's  thoughts as a composer go from the intimately personal, as in the fraternal tribute "Eclipse" (featuring first violinist Ilmar Gavilan) to the cosmic, as in the intricate space-travel conversation he sets up in "Talking to the Universe."  In "Aegean Dreams," the composer establishes a reflective scenario with a long initial passage in string harmonics, rippling piano underneath, that yields to a wistful viola melody, tenderly played Wednesday by Jaime Amador. 

For an encore, the group offered an interpretation of a piece it is justified in staking claim to: Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train," which is how you get to Harlem, as the lyric says. The performance featured improvised solos that generated responsive applause from the audience in the jazz manner.

The five musicians established their bona fides in the program's first half, consisting of Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet in E-flat major, op. 44. With second violinist Melissa White, the ensemble worked smoothly together, with slightly too much individuality of tone in some places. But the unanimity of effect was obvious throughout, led  by the sparkle and drive of Lopez-Gavilan's piano, no more so than in the Scherzo (third movement).  

Especially noteworthy was the group's ability to contrast the work's different thematic areas, with slight tempo adjustments: the doleful march profile of the second movement was neatly backed away from in the second theme without impairing the music's integrity. 

The ensemble regularly imbued transitional passages with suspense as the momentum built, particularly in the first and final movements. It amounted to a fresh, exciting interpretation of familiar music that suggested how adventurous the Harlem Quartet is comfortable being.

Another 'greatest' quartet

By Tom Aldridge

November 10, 2016

A capacity Basile Theater in the Indiana History Center witnessed a totally professional ensemble--from the word "go." When the Israeli based Jerusalem String Quartet--first violinist Alexander Pavlovsky, second violinist Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov--began with Haydn's Quartet in D, Op. 64 No. 5 ("Lark"), there was no lack of precision as there often is when a Haydn Quartet is the opener. This is the Jerusalem's second visit here, having appeared in 2014. 

Indeed the Haydn was played with the balance and precision usually heard in the featured quartet, in this case Beethoven's Quartet No. 7 in F, Op. 59 No. 1 (Rasumovsky). In between those two, we heard the Quartet No. 1 in B Minor, Op. 50, of Prokofiev. 

Haydn's "Lark" quartet is one of six he wrote in 1790, appearing shortly before his first trip to London. Beautiful is an apt description for this one. All four movements shone like burnished copper, with equal contributions by composer and performers. 

The Prokofiev, its world premiere in Washington D.C. in 1931, is the first of two in the genre, neither one of which is especially popular. Its three movements have a tonal center but with wide ranging harmonies conveying a sense of "wrong notes" scattered among the phrases. Nonetheless, its excellent playing provided a few quivers for my gut. 

Beethoven's Op. 59 No.1 is the first of three quartets dedicated to Count Rasumovsky and the first of five comprising his so-called "middle" period of quartet writing. It has its counterpart in his "Eroica" Symphony: longest quartet written to that point, greatly expanded first movement sonata form with an extended development. Its third movement, marked Adagio molto e mesto, comes close to forecasting Romantic writing. 

The Jerusalem players wove their way through the movements until, suddenly Bresler's bow tip broke halfway through the fourth movement. The music stopped while Bresler went backstage to effect a replacement. A resumption of playing a bit before they left off was done with aplomb. 

In deference to those quartets which can play with their vibratos in perfect sync, the Jerusalem either does not or cannot. What makes it more audible in their case is that all four members play with a rich, well controlled vibrato--all at slightly different speeds. Consider this caveat to be a mild one. Nov. 9

—Tom Aldridge
Taldrige@nuvo.net