Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993 TAG: 9310060116
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By Seth Williamson Special to Roanoke Times & World-News
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Saturday night's sold-out audience in the Squires Recital Salon and Sunday's much larger crowd in the Squires Colonial Ballroom heard the Audubons tackle the Op. 18, No. 6 Quartet in B-flat and the great Op. 131 Quartet in C-sharp minor.
Future audiences may suffer a sense of anticlimax because the greatest of all of the master's quartets, the Op. 131 work, was performed in the very first of this six-concert series. The B-flat major quartet may as well be the finest of the Opus 18 set.
The series is designed to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Audubon Quartet, just as the first Beethoven series ten years ago was performed to commemorate the Tech quartet-in-residence's first decade. These concerts will be preceded by a lecture on the music from Audubon second violinist David Salness.
The Audubons turned in a lovely, shapely performance of the Quartet in B-flat major that was marred only by tuning problems in the final movement. The energetic and happy first theme in the first movement settled down to a beautiful duet between first violinist David Ehrlich and cellist Tom Shaw.
The Audubons in general played beautifully in this initial quartet of their two-year series. Their lush sound has acquired a deeper and more burnished surface as the years have passed, and though Colonial Hall is not the acoustic space that the Squires Recital Hall is, the group still sounded terrific. Even in passages Beethoven purposely wrote to be thin, such as the spare accompaniment to David Ehrlich's statement of the second-movement Adagio's main theme, this quartet sounded full of potential energy and depth.
The Audubons had to interrupt the final movement because of tuning problems in Shaw's cello, which was adversely affected by the room's unnecessarily arctic air conditioning. Shaw was able to compensate somewhat as his instrument got gradually sharper, but when a tuning peg audibly popped, it was too much, and the group started the movement again from the beginning.
Despite the brief recess, this movement with its gravely melancholy main theme was the finest of the performance. They executed beautifully the three-note decorative grupetto that Beethoven added throughout the slow section, the German dance that attempts to dispel the gloom.
It's a truism in chamber music that a young quartet may have plenty of technique but still lack the maturity and spiritual depth necessary to perform Beethoven's difficult late quartets. The Audubons have long had the technique, and it seems they also have that other indefinable quality that these works demand.
The Audubons seemed to find the thread of unity that binds together the loose-jointed seven-movement structure of Op. 131, which is played without pause. This quartet lacks the many "pretty" moments the Op. 18, No. 6 work has, but the group as a whole played better.
Especially impressive was the fourth movement, which is the axle of the entire work. Ehrlich and Salness beautifully rendered the main theme of this movement.
If there were weak points, they seemed to occur in the following presto, whose light-footed and headlong flight wasn't as smooth as it could have been.
The second program in the Audubons' Beethoven cycle will take place on January 29th and 30th and will feature the Op. 18, No. 2, the Op. 74, and the Op. 132 quartets.
by CNB