Tokyo String Quartet has resounding effect

Author: Will Ceurvels

Amid the hedonistic revelry of the first weekend of the new academic year, a congregation of students, professors and townsfolk all gathered in Mead Chapel this past Friday to witness one of the greatest chamber ensembles in the world, The Tokyo String Quartet. Watching the quartet offer its interpretations of Beethoven's Opus 18 No. 3, Webern's Five Movements for String Quartet and Schubert's Final String Quartet in G Major, one immediately noticed a difference from previous quartet performances in the Center for The Arts Concert Hall, the listening experience was distinctly communal.

At Mead Chapel, one can sense the directed intent of the whole audience, watch the still, familiar faces in the balcony and feel the heat of bodies packed into narrow wooden benches. Oftentimes, the historical nature of classical music can be alienating, but in the distinctly social milieu of Mead Chapel, it becomes possible for the listener to conceive the pieces as documents of personal artistic expression.

The task of personifying the quartet ultimately lies in the hands of the artists. Throughout the night, the Tokyo String Quartet proved capable of some of the most studied and technically graceful interpretations to visit the campus in recent years. Composed of Violinists Martin Beaver and Kikuei Ikeda, Cellist Clive Greensmith and Violist Kazuhide Isomura, the quartet aptly demonstrated why they have, over the past 30 years, developed into one of the foremost chamber ensembles in the world, with residencies at New York University's Tisch School of Art and the Yale School of Music.

The quartet approached Beethoven's Opus 18 with an academic fidelity to detail, allowing the inherently robust drama of the late composer's composition to speak for itself. This was also the case with the quartet's rendering of Webern's Five Pieces, a modern composition of schizophrenic, pizzicato-heavy atonal sequences, contrasted with two slow, densely-textured melodic movements. Associate Professor of Music Peter Hamlin was impressed by the quartet's ability to "make such a modern piece sound classical, with an emphasis on the solo and the rich development of color." Andrew Throdahl '08, though overall very pleased by the concert, commented that he wished the quartet "had expressed more of the poetry that Webern strived to achieve" in the otherwise mathematical and conceptual period of serial and atonal composition.

For its final piece, the quartet selected Schubert's last composition for string quartet the epic and formidably modal quartet in G major. Here, the quartet's deep understanding of the music and ability to immerse themselves completely in a piece shone in perhaps its most brilliant light. "It was a piece to savor, like being on a long ski slope that you hope will never end," said Hamlin.

If Five Pieces was a modern composition steeped in a classical contextual reading, Schubert's quartet was its inverse - a classical piece so texturally dynamic and endlessly innovative; it sounded modern. The Tokyo String Quartet's performance of the piece further accentuated Schubert's modern forecasting. Hamlin noted that, at one point, "the quartet played with such aggression that there seemed to arise from their instruments a kind of resonant buzz, almost like distortion." It was in these nuances, expertly rendered, that the Tokyo String Quartet breathed a novel excitement into the works, leaving their audience in a spellbound rapture.

Sometimes, however, it is more than just the music which contributes to the spiritual and transcendent nature of the concert experience.

On this particular Friday night, the air coursed with the youthful exuberance of the student-dominated crowd. During the second movement of Schubert's quartet, an older gentlemen moved his hands up and down to some imaginary fretwork, mouthing "terrific!" - the feeling was contagious. "It sent chills up my spine to hear this music and then look around and realize I was surrounded by all my friends, experiencing the music as I was," said Shalini Vimal '07.5.

Special thanks must be given to the Institute for Clinical Science and Art for making possible something so simple, but so powerful - a night of beautiful musical performance shared by a community of friends.