by Kevin T McEneaney
As winners of the 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant Award, the Baldouret Quartet delivered an impressive and eclectic concert in Millbrook, NY. They opened with String Quartet in One Movement, Op.89 (1929) by Amy Beach (1867-1944), whose opus is currently enjoying a well-deserved revival.
This quartet opened with Benjamin Zannoni on viola and Angela Bae on first violin. Such an opening is unusual: the lead violin is usually considered the male voice while the viola is thought to be a subordinate female voice. The viola poses a question while the lead violin answers, while the second violin and cello support the first violin. The dissonant repartee between the viola and the lead violin forcefully debates. This sounds like a memory piece in the debate between Dr. Beach, who forbade his pianist wife Amy from performing in public. (After the doctor’s death, she was able to perform in public.)
The spare melodies come from the Inuit culture, a culture rejected by American prejudice, just as the abilities of American women were rejected by the musical establishment. The dissonance eventually arrives at happy harmonic unity. The allegory is both personal and broadly cultural. Zannoni and Bae excelled in this unusual dialogue-driven composition.
Galaxy Back to You (2024) by Nicky Sohn (b. 1992) offered an out-of-this-world experience. Sohn’s partner offered her the gift of a galaxy named after her as a cosmic birthday gift. The was a spiral galaxy discovered in 1791 that had a designated number and not a name. There are seven movements: Active Nucleus, Celestial Motion, Cosmic Dance, Mystical Steps, Water Masers, Supermassive Black Hole, and Gravitational Waves that undulate to harmonic resolution. This composition is so unusual and thrilling that it remains impossible to describe. Justin DePhilippis on first violin and Russell Houston on cello, who were incandescent! This composition was written specifically for the Baldouret Quartet, whom Nicky admires. This work was an amazing sonic treat!
String Quartet in F Major, M35 (1903) by Maurice Ravel provided a more grounded masterpiece. At the end of the nineteenth century, a controversy between German and French music developed: German composers insisted that contemporary music should be linear, avoiding cyclic repetition. Medieval Celtic music was built around cyclic repetition, symbolic of eternal time. Once counterpoint (which permitted chromatism and polyphony) was developed during the early Renaissance, the musical sense of time became secular rather than the eternal time evoked by folk-music refrains. German critics claimed that the refrain was obsolete, yet French composers like Ceasar Frank and Debussy continued to invent new ways of employing cyclic refrains. Ravel, who was half Basque, defended the use of thematic refrain through voracious appropriation of past material in the finale.
Ravel worked with modal scales, unique harmonies, impressionistic colors, and unexpected textures to forge this complex masterpiece, here performed with exquisite perfection by the Baldouret Quartet. Each instrument glowed with deep resonant depth during the four movements, the last movement incorporating elements of the three previous movements.
Piano Quartet in A Major, Op. 81 by Antonín Dvořák with pianist Sophia Zhou, concluded the concert. Zhou played with trilling eloquence, lending support and at times leading the quartet with assured panache. Zhou played the second movement Dumka Andante, with fragility and tenderness rather than anguished lament, which made me reconsider how I understand the whole composition. Zhou was appropriately fierce in the lively Scherzo Furiant and in the exciting Finale. All four members of the Baldouret Quartet played with such tight unity and zest that the rousing, optimistic conclusion was a cathartic experience for all attendees! The audience erupted with a standing ovation and demanded two appreciative bows.
This was a production of the Millbrook Music Salon under Stephen Kaye.
P.S. The June Van Cliburn pianist award-winner Evren Ozel will join the Terra Quartet to play Dvořák’s famous A-major Piano Quintet at the Tannery in New Lebanon on Saturday, September 6, at 2 pm. Concert tickets are $40. Link: Terra Quartet Evren Ozel, piano – Capital Region Classical
