The Isidore String Quartet, riding high after back-to-back years as winner of Canada’s prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition (2022) and an Avery Fisher Career Grant (2023) put their credentials to inspired effect in their Chesapeake Music Interlude concert Saturday night.
Never mind that the program listed a trio of pieces by dead European composers. The concert was adventurous enough with Bartok’s atonally immersive riff that critics derided as “barbaric” when his second string quartet debuted during World War I. But Ravel’s ground-breaking early career masterpiece and Mozart’s quartet that anticipated by at least two centuries the modern string quartet model made the program almost entirely contemporary in temperament and musical maturity.
The four New York-based Isidore musicians are graduates of the Juilliard School campus at Lincoln Center. They take their name from two sources – legendary Juilliard Quartet violinist Isidore Cohen but also their shared taste for vodka ascribed to a Greek monk named Isidore.
The concert opened with the last of six Mozart quartets championed by his mentor, Haydn – 24 years his senior. At the time – the 1780s – nearly all string quartets were basically first-violin solo pieces with a supporting cast of viola, cello and second violin. So shocking was Mozart’s String Quartet No. 6, nicknamed his “Dissonance” quartet, that his publisher assumed the score was a copying error. Haydn countered on behalf of his genius protege: “If Mozart wrote it, he must have meant it.”
The piece opens with, instead of a solo turn by Isidore violinist Phoenix Avalon, a ponderous motif that suggests a wandering in the dark of a bad dream, which shifts abruptly to a cheerful awakening that brilliantly involves all four string players in a musical conversation alternatively featuring violinists Avalon and Adrian Steele, violist Devin Moore and cellist Joshua McClendon.
The conversation resumes in the second movement andante with cellist McClendon providing the heartbeat thoughline. The third movement minuet is anything but the standard ballroom dance vibe. There’s a turbulent undercurrent with counterpoint interruptions in the flow with a return to the melancholy of the opening bars of the first movement. The allegro finale suggests a cheerful resolution to the preceding turmoil with almost giddy turns of musical phasing by Avalon and Steele with fluttering syncopation by violist Moore and grounded by cellist McClendon for a skilled landing.
Bartok’s String Quartet No. 2, completed in 1917 in the middle of the Great War, now known as World War I, almost demands a bleak musical format. The piece opens with a peaceful if restless opening, as if awakening in the middle of the night but unable to fall back asleep, watching the inside of your eyelids a soon-to-be realized horror. The second movement borrows on both Bartok’s native Hungarian folkloric themes with Arabic overtones from his North African studies to create a desperate intensity led by violist Moore and cellist McClendon which dissolves into a brooding finale dramatically marked by a swelling requiem theme punctuated by moments of reverential near-silence.
After intermission, the first violin chair role switched to Adrian Steele who led a romantic opening, which morphed into urgent and then wistful phrasing that may suggest love lost. Quivering regrets are reflected in the pizzicato and plucking of string percussion in a brief second movement followed by a slow, melodic revisit of earlier themes. The finale encompasses all the shifting moods of the whole with moments of agitation, joy and reflection in between. In each expression, the Isidore quartet delivered the goods as they did in each of the first two remarkably relevant string quartets written two centuries ago.
Of note: This was the first major concert event under the helm of Chesapeake Music’s new executive director David Faleris following founder Don Buxton’s retirement. So far, so good.
Chesapeake Music Interlude Concert
Isidore String Quartet, Saturday night, Oct. 5, at Ebenezer Theatre, Easton.
Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.
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