Fresh Rhodora in the Woods

THE PROGRAM LOOKED more audience-challenging than I’d expect in a place like North Creek, NY, with string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Bela Bartók, and George Walker on the program. I’d felt like an outsider all day while relaxing in this charmingly rural community, because I wasn’t clad in the standard uniform of the male habitués: ball cap, tee shirt, shorts, and sneakers (or sandals or flip-flops). But at the Tannery Pond Community Center that evening, July 2, I felt more sartorially at home in my conservative shirt and slacks.

Rhodora Quartet

The handsome, energy-efficient building, erected in 2002, features an art gallery and large multi-use room that serves as an auditorium when so arranged. Tannery Pond Concerts, however, go back to 1991 when photographer Christian Steiner inaugurated the series, and the same high quality of artists and concerts he oversaw is clearly maintained.

 
The ear-filling sound of an SATB chorus fits nicely into the voicing of a string quartet. There are enough voices available to reinforce harmonic identity, and enough to further play with that identity, dipping into dissonance, affirming and thwarting rhythmic expectations.

As is well known, Haydn molded the form through his 68 (official) string quartets into four-movement classicism, a model acknowledged by Mozart and Beethoven – and then pursued by Beethoven into previously unimaginable places where all precedent of form and harmony was shattered.

The Rhodora Quartet skipped Beethoven, a brave move, and went straight from Haydn to Bartók. After Beethoven, Bartók wreaked the greatest changes on the form. Our ears have absorbed Beethoven’s changes; we’re still adjusting to Bartók’s. This is a youthful performing group with the brashness of youth, so they concluded the program with a work even crunchier, in its way, than Bartók’s quartet, which was an early piece by American composer George Walker.

“The Rhodora” is poem by Emerson, and in choosing this moniker, the performers are paying tribute to their mentors, the Emerson Quartet. I also like the suggestion of New England-style iconoclasm. The quartet was founded two years ago. They satisfy the twin requirements of such an ensemble by featuring players with the sound and ability of soloists who are then able to subsume that into an entity that functions as if with one brain. In entomological terms, they’re a superorganism. 

The members are violinists Chaewon Kim and Hanbo Wang, violist Rachel Haber, and cellist Jonathan Kim. Haber introduced the first work, setting up just enough background and expectation for Haydn’s Quartet No. 75 (or 40 or 60 depending on your favored numbering convention) in G Major, Op. 76 No. 1 to give a comfortable entry for newcomers to this piece. I very much approve of spoken intros like this when they’re brief and fact-filled, as was this one (and those that followed).

There’s a pleasant, unobtrusive sound to the work. Was Haydn’s initial audience as inclined to background-listen as we are today? A clue to that waits in the lively Menuet movement, which erupts into a brisk fortissimo moment that the performers played for all it was worth. No dynamic bashfulness here, and when the bouncy, triplet-laden finale arrived, they found all the fun that movement contained.

An excellent artistic decision, and an important programming one as well, because the transition to Bartók can seem abrupt. No background-listening invited here. The composer finished his Quartet No. 2 (of six) in 1917 amidst the horrors of a no-end-in-sight war. While Bartók incorporated elements of the Hungarian folksongs he assiduously collected, he painted his melodic material onto what could be interpreted as a bloodstained canvas. The work is in three movements – Moderato, Allegro molto capriccioso, Lento – the first two in classical forms, the last more free-form. And I’m inclined to consider this a four-movement work with the last movement omitted to reinforce the dramatic effect of the Lento.

As with all of Bartók’s quartets, this one needs virtuoso players, and the Rhodora ensemble was absolutely in control of the material. Furthermore, these aren’t performers (as are far too many these days) who seek to assert some manner of interpretive genius by imposing pauses that go beyond the limits of rubato. These players clearly understand that what the music needs to be said is said by the music, and the cumulative effect of the Bartók quartet was devastating.

George Walker was an American pianist and composer who lived from 1922 to 2018, and who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for “Lilacs,” a setting of Whiteman. His String Quartet No. 1 was written in 1946, just after his graduation from the Curtis Institute and around the time of his debut as a piano soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. 

This, too, is a three-movement work, this one placing its most emotionally devastating movement in the middle. That Adagio was later reworked by the composer in 1990 as an orchestral piece titled “Lyric for Strings.” Was the movement inspired by Barber’s “Adagio,” which premiered as an orchestral work in 1938? There is a similarity of spirit, but I submit that Walker’s piece packs for more of a sensory punch.

In any event, the movement laid its sweet, somber, soulfulness upon a very receptive audience, who then enjoyed some relief with the work’s lively Allegro con fuoco finish. Some tentative rhythms and intonation crept in towards the concert finish, which I put down to the taxing challenge of the three works, but the players came roaring back in the generous encore, a movement from Wynton Marsalis’s String Quartet No. 1. The seven-movement quartet is titled “At the Octoroon’s Ball,” paying tribute to the composer’s New Orleans roots; the movement chosen by the Rhodora Quartet, “Hellbound Highball” gives us the roaring energy of a train (the best such since Ellington’s “Daybreak Express”), and the players were in peak form throughout.