Review: Four Quartets, Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
By: Martin Bernheimer

This was not your ordinary, garden-variety concert. In fact, it was only half a concert.

The locale, on Wednesday night, was an intimate makeshift studio at the progressive arts centre created by Mikhail Baryshnikov in the so-called Hell’s Kitchen district of Manhattan. Sponsorship was officially shared by the distant Lincoln Center organisation and the hosting dance establishment. Optimistic catch-all labels for the event included “Great Performers” and “New Visions”. And the programme – all too generous at two and a half hours – juxtaposed drastically dissimilar elements: the lofty complexity of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935-42) and the magnificent gnarl of Beethoven’s A-minor String Quartet (1825).

In her introductory annotation, Jane Moss, a Lincoln Center vice-president, mused about “the exhausted and decayed romanticism of our own age, and the prescient despair and anxiety of our 19th-century musical guides”. Both, she concluded, “point to one end: the timeless, the universal, and the transcendent”. So now we know.

According a prominent credit, the guiding force behind this exhausting mishmash was Katie Mitchell, the controversial iconoclast who directed the same exercise at London’s Donmar Warehouse last January. It was hard to figure out, however, just what she had contributed to the proceedings.

First, the splendid actor Stephen Dillane delivered 75 minutes of Eliot’s mysticism, religiosity and temporal Weltschmerz in expressive yet drastically muted tones. Dressed in professorial mufti, he recited the poetry – a prodigious feat of memorisation – from various positions in the otherwise empty playing-area, occasionally suggesting potential drama by raising his right hand. He retired to a folding chair and sipped bottled water between movements. After the interval, the youthful Miró Quartet, spotlit amid theatrical shadows, made the late-Beethoven sprawl sound furious and ferocious, rough and raucous, gutsy and gusty. The words had been introspective; the music, by contrast, emerged overwrought.

And how were these precious and pretentious, essentially independent halves connected? Ask not. We do know, of course, that Eliot professed some interest in Beethoven. But …