Oct. 15, Singleton Arts Center, Virginia Commonwealth University
The Isidore Quartet, a young ensemble (formed in 2019) with an already impressive résumé – winning the 2022 Banff International String Quartet Competition, receiving a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant – made a memorable local debut in the latest installment of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts series.
The foursome – violinists Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon, violist Devin Moore and cellist Joshua McClendon – bracketed a 2012 string quartet by Billy Childs with two milestones of music’s classical period, Haydn’s Quartet in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, and Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, in performances marked by intense concentration, clarity of instrumental textures and storytelling-in-sound sensibility.
Childs, best-known as a jazz pianist, is also an estimable classical composer. His Quartet No. 2 (“Awakening”) was inspired by the trauma of his wife’s hospitalization with a pulmonary embolism. The quartet evokes the panic that Childs experienced when he learned of the diagnosis and the bleak fear he endured at her bedside, concluding in what Moore calls an “ode to recovery and rediscovery” as the couple healed physically and spiritually.
The Isidore’s performance of Childs’ quartet conveyed the raw emotionality of the piece with playing of tight tonal focus, unerring timing – silences have rarely sounded as tensely pregnant – and vivid realization of internal drama bursting outward. This music could not have a more compelling interpretation than these musicians delivered.
Haydn’s six Op. 20 quartets mark the birth of the string quartet as a prime vehicle for composers, a proving ground for musical structure, harmonic exploration, expressive range and the interweaving of audibly discrete voices. Among Haydn’s many musical inventions – he also sired the piano sonata, piano trio and symphony as we know them – these quartets may be the most inventive and influential.
The Isidore’s reading of the Haydn acknowledged its musical-historical resonance without sounding didactic or over-awed by its stature. The musicians played with spontaneity, balancing quizzical playfulness with Sturm und Drang intensity, consistently giving listeners a sound-picture of one of music’s supreme innovators at his most creative.
Violinists Steele and Avalon and violist Moore adhered to the modern “historically informed” practice of playing with minimal vibrato, staying gratifyingly in tune as they did, producing unusual transparency in voicing and texture. Moore and cellist McClendon enhanced that transparency with strongly projected bass lines.
A comparably well-delineated performance of the Beethoven usefully dispelled the common notion that Beethoven blew off the periwigged classicism of “Papa Haydn,” his former teacher. In fact, the teacher’s influence was always present in Beethoven’s music, never more so than in his late string quartets.
The Isidore’s phrasing, voicing and timing in Beethoven’s Op. 132 was Haydnesque in its textural transparency and explorative quality, even as it was unmistakably Beethovenian in its potency and expressive scope.
In a neat display of context in program-making, the “Heilige Dankgesang” (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving”), the aural memoir of illness and recovery that forms the centerpiece of the Beethoven quartet, came across as a pre-echo of the resolution of Childs’ “Awakening.”
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