Omer Quartet. July 2, 2018.

Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University.  Balcony (free).

Program

String Quartet in F Major, op. 50, no. 5 “The Dream” by Haydn (1732-1809).

Four Script Styles of Chinese Calligraphy by Yiwen Shen (b. 1986).

String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, Sz. 40, BB 52, op. 7 by Bartok (1881-1945).

Artists: Mason Yu, Erica Tursi, violin; Jinsun Hong, viola; Alex Cox, cello.

For 51 years, the Princeton University Summer Chamber Concerts produces a series of chamber music concerts that is free to the community.  We have been going to them for several years, and plan to make three of the four concerts this season.

It was going to be the Zora Strings – a resident quartet at the Curtis Institute – that would be performing tonight.  For reasons not given to us (which is okay) the Omer Quartet was asked to substitute.  All the musicians look young, and are apparently graduates of Cleveland.  The quartet is now resident at the University of Maryland.

The Haydn quartet is vintage Haydn.  At some point I was wondering what the name given to it would be (I hadn’t looked at the program yet), and was surprised to see “The Dream” as I didn’t hear anything like that in the piece (or Haydn’s dreams were different from mine.)  The other interesting aspect was the glissando-sounding passages in the fourth movement.  That was the first time I heard such a sound in the violin, so I looked into the score.  The marking was “sopra una corda.”  I guess this effect is a by-product of moving the fingers up a string.

As a side remark, there are entire books devoted to early Haydn chamber music!

The sound from the first violin was brilliant.  Per the quartet’s website, the violin played by Yu is an Amati on loan to him.  He in general played very well, although I thought his intonation was off on several occasions.  The movements of the quartet are: Allegro moderato, Poco adagio, Menuetto: Allegretto, and Finale: Vivace.

Beginning of the fourth movement of the Haydn Quartet.  The effect of "sopra una corda" is like a short glissando.

Tursi talked about the Chinese Calligraphy piece written by Shen.  The two evidently knew each other (Shen has a doctoral degree from Julliard, and Tursi is a current student; per their websites) as she joked that one could call Shen about how the music should be played, but not Haydn or Bartok.

The work performed tonight consists of four movements, each patterned after a style of Chinese calligraphy: Clerical Script (隸書), Regular (楷書), Semi-Cursive (行書), and Cursive (草書).  Chinese in parentheses are taken from Wikipedia.  The last two are played attaca, but Tursi reassured the audience that they could tell by the wild finish.  I am not good at associating pictures with music, but there certainly were differences in style from one movement to the other.  As contemporary music goes, this was easy to take – being short at less than 10 minutes certainly helped.  I do have a what-if question of how things would sound if Shen had written a set of variations based on the different scripts.

Tursi also said something about the Bartok quartet.  Bartok evidently was very smitten by a pianist and wrote a concerto for her.  As a reaction to this requited love Bartok wrote this string quartet, beginning a dirge-sounding movement (Lento).  The music was ultimately uplifting after the second (Allegretto – Introduzione) and third (Allegro vivace) movements.  Along the way Bartok would incorporate these folk melodies that he collected as a ethnomusicologist.

All good, except most of what she said was difficult to prove (I looked), I did find references to a Stefi Geyer who was a violinist.  Also, the music was difficult to get on a first listen for me.  Bartok is usually easy to get in some way, tonight’s piece remained out of reach for me.  As opposed to the Shen piece, there are many recordings of this quartet on YouTube.

The viola got quite a bit of workout in this piece, which had a much better balance among the instruments than the Haydn.  The quartet should certainly be congratulated for putting out a well-coordinated performance, with seamless handoffs between instruments, and great dynamics.

Yu, Tursi, Cox, and Hong at the conclusion of the concert.  The audience was very appreciative.

The Omer Quartet is certainly a capable substitute for any other ensemble.  I would have enjoyed a more traditional programming, but what I heard tonight was fine.

We met up with the Yee’s at Panera Bread and talked about our respective musical tours.  They just spent about two weeks in Leipzig attending more than 30 concerts at the Bach Festival.