PORT ANGELES, Wash. — In what has become an annual tradition, the Music on the Strait chamber music festival again welcomed the Takács Quartet, pianist Jeremy Denk, and the festival’s composer-in-residence, Gabriela Lena Frank, for the final two concerts (Aug. 28 and 29) of its two-weekend summer event. Both concerts took place in two locations in Port Angeles on the edge of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which connects Puget Sound with the Pacific Ocean.
Music on the Strait was founded in 2018 by two musician friends, violinist James Garlick and violist Richard O’Neill of Takács, who grew up in neighboring towns bordering the Olympic National Forest on Northwest Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. So loyal is the festival’s core audience that the organization now mounts three to four other concerts in the fall and spring and supports a strong community education program with a focus on youth.
Although I had to miss this year’s opening-night concert, whose high point was the world premiere of Frank’s El mundo for mezzo-soprano and string quartet, I did attend another world premiere — the debut performance of Takács’s new cellist, Mihai Marica. He has replaced András Fejér, who had played with the quartet for over 50 years, since its founding in 1975. With Fejér’s departure, first violinist Edward Dusinberre, the 33-year quartet member whose soaring, quicksilver tone and impeccable dynamic control are central to the quartet’s sound, serves as the remaining link to the sound and sensitivity for which Takács is prized.
The warmth of Marica’s tone and his ability to perform as an equal partner are major assets. Especially notable, during the Aug. 29 program of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert in Peninsula College’s acoustically superior, 134-seat Maier Hall, was his cello’s edgeless, grain-free blend with O’Neill’s viola. From my seat in the first row, where color and detail were at their strongest, it was equally apparent how well Dusinberre’s brilliance and second violinist Harumi Rhodes’ softer and smoother sound complement each other and the sensitivity of the other players.
The Allegro con brio opening of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 18, No. 6, may not have sounded as boundlessly joyful as in some performances of the work, but the ideal balance between the contrasting timbres of the four players elicited a joy all its own. The blend between Marica’s cello and O’Neill’s viola was heavenly. The second movement was defined by an all-encompassing grace. A scherzo followed by prayerful stillness and then slashing drama showcased Marica’s ability to play at full volume without any of the growling and edge that mar many a cellist’s performance. I was equally wooed by soft passages exquisitely voiced and shaped and, as always, Dusinberre’s singing tone.
Switching gears, Takács fully conveyed the storm and pain wracking Mendelssohn as he composed his final String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 (1847), shortly after his sister’s death, during the final months of his life. Marica seemed to play from the center of the composer’s heart as Rhodes communicated the sting of his beloved sister’s death. Although at one point in the third movement Marica sounded a bit less plush than the music required, he more than compensated during the finale. The distilled sadness the quartet communicated through its consistently sympathetic, perfectly blended playing was extremely moving.
The one disappointment was Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (Death and the Maiden). I heard Takács perform this quartet several decades ago in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, when founding second violinist Károly Schranz, Fejér, and Dusinberre performed with another violist.
That performance was so moving that, during the final movement, I could barely breathe. Several decades later, although balance, tonality, and dynamics were perfectly judged, Takács did not achieve a similar level of transcendence. Death seemed more seductive and tuneful than final.
The following afternoon, in 500-seat Field Hall, the concert began with an announcement that because Denk was suffering from a cold, he was replacing Beethoven’s Tempest Piano Sonata with a less demanding piece he’d been playing all summer, Bach’s Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 830. This enabled him to conserve his resources for the final work on the program, Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor.
How Denk’s Bach would have sounded on other occasions, I do not know. But here, as masterful as his playing was — countless rapid waterfalls of notes from his right hand attested to his excellence — his left hand frequently predominated, upsetting the coherence of Bach’s musical argument.
Frank’s gracious and inviting spoken introduction to her Quijotadas (2007) for string quartet helped compensate for a program booklet that lacked all commentary and inexplicably omitted the titles of the work’s five movements. Regardless, Takács ideally conveyed the fantasy, madness, and eventual reconciliation with reality that Don Quixote experiences in Cervantes’ landmark novel, El Ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. The third movement, “Moto Perpetuo: La Locura de Quijote,” sounded absolutely delusional and the fourth movement’s wacky, saddening, whirlingly dissonant and eerily nightmarish music extraordinarily powerful.
For audience members who could stick with the program’s transition from classicism to musical language far more suited to the turbulence of our times, the off-kilter dance and saddening conclusion of the final “La Danza de los Arrieros” propelled them to their feet in rapturous applause. What a glorious piece of music.
As also has been said of Franck’s Piano Quintet, performed here by musicians unafraid of conveying heart-on-sleeve yearning, tenderness, and vulnerability. With its new member, the 51-year-old Takács remains one of the great quartets of our time.
