LAURENTIAN LISTENING AT STANFORD
                    A Quartet Becomes a Well-Strung Five  
                                           By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Feb. 1-8,  2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 58
            STANFORD---A juxtaposed lineup, an added violist and a very strange program drew in a full house at Dinkelpiel Auditorium for another St. Lawrence String Quartet concert Jan. 30.
            Like a Super Bowl team interchanging its cornerbacks, the group had switched its longtime leaders so that Geoff Nuthall now plays second violin, and Scott St. John first violin. The two blend their sound beautifully. The restless pair also is guaranteed to do more movement with feet and legs during performance than your typical ballet dancer, with St. John on occasion literally lifted off his chair with the animated movement.
            They had also engaged violist Hsin-Yun Huang, a New Yorker out of Taiwan who proved to be considerably more than  fifth wheel. She paired closely with SLSQ violist Lesley Robertson, particularly noticeable in both works offering duet-like segments for their matched instruments.
            The night’s success was decidedly Brahms’ last String Quintet (No. 2, Op. 111, 1891). Here the players shelved their stiff-upper-lip, formal tendencies for which they are known as they flowed freely with Brahms’ rich counterpoint and wealth of themes, taking little risks here and there. I was particularly taken by the third movement, with that autumnal quality found in Brahms’  later works---wistful, nostalgic, reflective.
            The well-strung five also rendered a rarity, the Quintet No. 1 (1789) by John Frederick Peter, one of the musical Moravians who settled in Salem, North Carolina. This is credited as the first chamber music composed in America. It’s a 13-minute  lighter, animated  piece with dance connotations in which Peter often paired off the two violins, or the two violas, without consistently uniting the ensemble.
            Such a program cried out for something meaty and modern in the middle, and in this Prokofiev fell short with his Second (and last) Quartet. Written in 1941 during the composer’s World War Two resettlement in the Caucasus, it plugged in a passel of folk tunes from the local Kabardinian minority in that region. The piece was uncharacteristically rough-hewn, like a two-by-four beam which still shows craggy tree bark on the edges. Those rough edges were deliberate, but they meant suppressing the composer’s complex style (which seemed to have been channeled instead into the composer’s concurrent “War and Peace” composition).  There is a lot of vehement bowing, but in the end it’s not his most engaging bit of chamber music.
            The SLSQ, entirely Canadian but for cellist Christopher Costanza, is in residence at Stanford University. It was formed 22 years ago.
            St. Lawrence String Quartet in concert Jan. 30, under auspices of Stanford Lively Arts. For Lively Arts info: (650) 725-2787, or go online.

          ©D. Rane Danubian 2011
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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