HOUSTON – Da Camera loves to create and/or present concerts with a theme, and the Jan. 27 performance at the Menil Collection by the Aizuri Quartet, which is known for its innovative and thoughtful programming, was a stimulating example.
“Music and Isolation” featured works dating from the 12th century to 1988. The composers and the reason for their isolation from the worlds around them were Hildegard von Bingen (a woman writing church music in the early middle ages), Carlo Gesualdo (the psychological trauma and resultant kerfuffle after he slaughtered his wife and her lover found in flagrante delicto), Franz Joseph Haydn (he was somewhat trapped as house composer to the Esterhazy princes), Ludwig van Beethoven (the physical impairment of deafness), and Conlon Nancarrow (he became a reclusive exile in Mexico in 1940 because his politics — he was a member of the Communist Party and fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War — were anything but popular in America).
The Aizuri’s Houston debut opened with a chant by Hildegard, “Columba aspexit,” and a pair of 1611 madrigals by Renaissance master of expressive chromaticism Gesualdo, “O tenebroso giorno” and “Io parto e non più dissi.” Arranged for string quartet by Alex Fortes, the pieces were played as a 12-minute, unbroken, three-movement whole (the Azurians didn’t put much breathing room between sections no matter the piece). With no vibrato but a wide dynamic range flexibly exploited, the sonorities tended to stay in the throaty middle registers of the upper strings – violinists Emma Frucht and Miho Saegusa, with Frucht playing second fiddle in this part of the program, and violist Ayane Kozasa – as cellist Karen Ouzounian laid down an anchoring drone enlivened by some skittery phrases.
The Aizuri jumped ahead centuries for the next item on the program, the String Quartet No. 3 by Nancarrow (1912‒1997), who is best known for his works for player piano. Written for the Arditti Quartet “in the spirit” of that instrument, which can negotiate extremely complex rhythmic patterns at speeds far beyond the capabilities of mere mortals, the work is based on a six-note scale. Its three movements are canons (the piece’s subtitle is Canons 3/4/5/6) in which the musicians go at different speeds, playing different numbers of notes per measure.
The most striking movement is the second, an eerie six minutes of whispery, high-altitude harmonics and pizzicatos with suspenseful spaces between the plinks and sighs. The wispy, twinkly music is so pianissimo that a fifth voice, a soft, high-pitched drone from the air conditioning or something, was briefly heard at the very end. Anyplace else in the score, it would have been (and may have been) inaudible. In the rambunctious final movement, Ouzounian plucked the cello strings like a jazz musician on bass (Nancarrow was a jazz trumpeter in his youth), and the piece ends rather abruptly after a chain of angry trills. The Aizurians were not fazed by the second-movement intruder — or anything else in this ferociously knotty 14-minute score.
Founded in 2012, the Aizuri Quartet draws its name from “aizuri-e,” a style of predominantly blue Japanese woodblock printing noted for its vibrancy and detail. The same could be said of the playing by this New York-based ensemble, which has been a quartet-in-residence at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute, and the Curtis Institute of Music. It is a fervent advocate of new music and has commissioned works by a number of composers, five of whom are featured on the group’s 2019 Grammy-nominated New Amsterdam Records CD, Blueprinting.
The Aizuri was on more traditional ground with Haydn’s String Quartet No. 49 in B minor, Op. 64, No. 2. Even so, two of the members literally kept one foot in the world of the new. Kozasa and Frucht, the latter unlike her partners not a founding member of the foursome, used old-time sheet music, while Saegusa and Ouzounian employed foot-operated iPads to do hands-free page turning. But, preferring robustness to a fragile-as-porcelain approach to the 1790 score, all four were on the same page in producing assured accounts of the lyrical slow movement, the jaunty Menuetto with its playful hesitations, and the briskly tripping finale with more of those witty pauses and a close that drifts quietly into the stratosphere so evocatively explored in the Nancarrow quartet.
The last work on the program, Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, displayed the Aizuri’s polished sonic profile to full advantage. Book-ended by Frucht’s deliciously sweet violin and Ouzounian’s mellow cello, the territory between was effulgently filled by Saegusa’s violin and Kozasa’s viola. Together, they danced neatly through the sprightly Presto and plumbed the emotional depths of the somber first movement and soulful slow movement and really dug into the slashing accents in the dramatic finale of the work that critic and scholar Michael Steinberg called “the last of Beethoven’s great tragedies in music” and “the greatest of his quartets.”
William Albright is a freelance writer in Houston who has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, American Record Guide, Opera, The Opera Quarterly, and other publications.
