Review: Animated Small Talk
Translation: Jason Denner

The American “Miró Quartet” showed at the Alte Oper that its name is by no means the program.

Why does a string quartet name itself after the painter Joan Miró, the most important Spanish surrealist? The interprative style of the four Americans is anything but dreamlike, visionary, bizarre or abstract. Rather the quartet, founded in 1995, tends towards a faithfulness to the text that sometimes approaches qualities of delicate understatement.

The sound is very transparent, thanks to the tone quality of the violist John Largess; the violins (Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto) occasionally risk unusually strong Vibrato, while the cellist Joshua Gindele seems the center of the ensemble. With the Quartet op. 96 from Dvorak, the four musicians, who teach in Austin, Texas, offered up a dazzling calling card: not overdone in rhythm or tempo, animated small talk among the parts, elegant, yet virtuosic. The evening, which opened with Beethoven’s F-major Quartet op. 135, offered another facet of American music in the Quartet op. 11 from Samuel Barber; one heard
the famous Adagio in its rather episodic frame: clarity of sound and effortless cantilenas abducted the enthusiastic audience into other worlds.