SAN DIEGO — Every city needs at least one arts organization that programs the acts its local mainstream arts groups don’t, whether this is because those acts are still emerging, defy genres, or simply have a niche audience. San Diego is blessed with at least two, the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla and the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) ArtPower, hosts of Finland’s Meta4 string quartet on April 25.
Founded in 1993, ArtPower describes its three constituencies as UCSD students, UCSD faculty, and the general San Diego community. The range of its performance calendar reflects that broad market: dance, theater, film, spoken arts, and, of course, music, from folk, world, funk, and electronica to pop/rock, jazz, and classical. ArtPower’s annual arts calendar has recently been growing, fueled by a new trolley line connecting the UCSD campus to the city and a new 2,650-seat outdoor amphitheater, which gives ArtPower at least six campus venues (aside from several venues in the city).
At the UCSD’s acoustically fine Conrad Prebys Hall, Meta4, Finland’s oldest and most respected active quartet, offered the kind of eclectic program (title: “Polarkr(e)is Drifting North”) that’s becoming an endangered species: Kaija Saariaho’s “Fleurs de neige,” Amy Beach’s String Quartet in One Movement, Krishna Nagaraja’s Stringar, and — the only piece on the program with more than three recordings — Sibelius’s Voces Intimae String Quartet in D minor (upwards of 40 recordings).
As their unusual name (from first-name initials) hints, Meta4 is not your grandfather’s string quartet. Formed in 2001 by cellist Tomas Djupsjöbacka, violinists Antti Tikkanen and Minna Pensola (now married to one other), and violist Eriikka Nylund (current violist Atte Kilpeläinen replaced her in 2006), Meta4 has consistently trekked outside The Canon. Against their recordings of canonical Sibelius, Bartók, Haydn, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Shostakovich, they’ve recorded the likes of Sebastian Fagerlund, Gérard Pesson, Salvatore Sciarrino, Krishna Nagaraja, Jan Dussek, Jaakko Kuusisto, and (coming next) Outi Tarkiainen.
The quartet enhances its edgy brand by playing standing (Djupsjöbacka excepted) and projecting an unconventional style — from anti-tux clothing and occasional swaying and stomping while playing to laconically humorous stage banter. Another differentiator, the group’s longevity, stems from an early decision: “When we started,” Djupsjöbacka told me, “all members already had multiple professional activities in multiple roles of their own. By not being full-time, we give ourselves space to be inspired by other professional settings and colleagues.”
If any listeners worried that all this edginess might threaten musicality, Meta4’s spellbinding, sensitively unanimous playing obliterated doubt. The evening opened with Saariaho’s arrangement (for Meta4) of the last movement of her five-movement Neiges for Eight Cellos (1998), which Saariaho’s website notes was “inspired by the shimmers, structural symmetries, and mutations of snow.”
“Fleurs de neige” (flowers of snow) has “no barlines,” Kilpeläinen said, “so the piece is constantly ‘floating’ in the air, and all performances are very different and unique — as are snow flakes!” A three-minute wisp of a piece, it nevertheless immediately established Meta4’s ability to set and shape hypnotic moods and locked in the evening’s environmental, “nature is culture” theme.
If Amy Beach’s Mahlerian time has finally come, in Meta4’s hands her 15-minute String Quartet in One Movement showed her as much more than a female post-Brahmsian Romantic. At 40, Beach (1867-1944) discovered Inuit folk songs in the writings of anthropologist Franz Boas; in the 1920s, she reimagined them into her chromatic, occasionally dissonant Op. 89. It’s an intense, unsettled, even haunting work that deserves more than the three recordings it’s received.
Though neither Inuit nor Finnish, Indian-Italian composer-violist Krishna Nagaraja perfectly aligned with Meta4’s program via his own interest in folk music, in this case Norwegian. The title of his Stringar string quartet is a play on the Norwegian word springar, a verb meaning to leap or run and also the name of an “a bit deranged” Norwegian folk dance played on an eight- or nine-stringed Hardanger fiddle. The 25-minute work is divided into three movements, each named after a dance — “Udelt Takt,” “Telespringar,” “Valdesspringar” — from a different region in Norway. Meta4 redeemed their unpersuasive 2022 recording of the piece (on Tales from Norway, Challenge Classics) by creating a mesmerizing, magnetic sonic world of shifting tempos, drone-like harmonics, trenchant rock-music rhythms, and multiple voices syncing into and out of each other à la Reich.
How exactly did this program’s folkloric focus connect with its stated environmental (“Polar Circle / Polar Crisis”) theme? In the pre-concert talk, Tikkanen explained it all with understated eloquence: “The nature that surrounds us is the core of our culture. If we lose nature as it was and is, we also lose the culture that made the songs and the thoughts of the people who originated these melodies. It’s connected in all possible ways, from the earth to what we see and what we hear.”
Which brought us, inevitably, to Sibelius, the nature-haunted Finn who still casts his shadow over every compatriot composer. Created as Sibelius grappled with extreme debt (almost one million current dollars) and his weakness for alcohol and tobacco, he confided in his diary after completing it: “The quartet is finished. Yes — my heart bleeds — why this sense of pain in life? My God! Four pairs of children’s eyes and a wife stare at me, virtually a pauper. What have I done to deserve it? At least I’ve composed well.”
His Voces Intimae (Intimate Voices) feels less like a dialogue with another than an agitated, frequently dark conversation with himself or his own loneliness. It’s an unfailingly gripping piece that Meta4 delivered with grace and conviction. Tikkanen and Pensola provided the keening, upper-register anguish, Kilpeläinen an earthier, brooding beauty, and Djupsjöbacka a rich, anchoring foundation.
Against all odds, Meta4’s unusual, richly conceived program succeeded in being both deadly serious and wildly entertaining.
