Isidore String Quartet, from left, Adrian Steele, Devin Moore, Phoenix Avalon and Joshua McClendon
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.
The 1947 Broadway original, as well as the 1951 movie starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, is a taut and fraught love-hate story involving sisters and the husband of one and brother-in-law of the other. We encounter the first main character as she arrives at her destination on the title streetcar. Blanche DuBois is shocked to find what she considers the squalor her sister Stella lives in with her husband Stanley Kowalski. Stella returns home shortly after to greet her and suffer Blanche’s complaints about sleeping arrangements consigning her to a couch. Because it is his bowling night, Stanley shows up just in time to wolf down his supper before reporting for his overnight job.
Citing what he calls the “Napoleonic Code,” that which belongs to the wife (or her family) belongs to him. This motivates Stanley to ask questions about Belle Reve and Blanche’s side of the story and why she now has no place to turn to but the Kowalski second-story walk-up. If you aren’t already familiar, never mind the spoiler answers his investigation reveals.
Here are the leading suspects in making this happen. Cavin Moore as Blanche achieves such an astonishing transformation, particularly as we had an hour or so earlier caught her as a radio-play singer and deliverer of zingers. In “Desire,” we see her struggling to relive her long-past post-graduate schoolgirlish days like those of ones she later taught. But she can’t hide behind badly told jokes to lift her spirits after an unhappy birthday cake-and-candles ritual. As Stella, Liv Litteral tries to hide desperation for her sister but also for herself in that, with a baby coming, she has no better way forward than Blanche if the bully in her husband overtakes his professed love for her.
