Whale Watching

Islands

Josh catches a perfect sockeye salmon with his bare hands!

Fresh salmon right off the boat!  $20 bucks for the whole fish!

Who’s that young group in all white?

A view of the Maverick Performance Shed, a venue we have been playing in for over 10 years!

Silicon Valley’s contribution to the advancement of chamber music culture in northern California is evolving with flair in its eighth summer season. Thematic programming, hitherto hazily developed, is acquiring focus, while an increased concentration on the vocal repertoire is adding further lustre to proceedings.

This year, pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel, the festival’s founders, have arranged their main-stage concerts around the quest for national identity in music. “The English Voice” proved a game place to start; this profile of a culture awakening from a 200-year musical slumber was instructive. In his 1918 piano quintet, Elgar reluctantly bids farewell to the past and the spectre of Brahms, asserting an individual voice in an adagio that aches with nostalgia for what was. Here, a sensitive pianist, Inon Barnatan, and the bright Miró Quartet stated their case eloquently.

To read the review in its entirety, please click here.

It’s one thing to read about the traumatic global upheavals of the mid-20th century, and quite another to hear them expressed as forcefully as they were in the music of Wednesday night’s superb chamber concert at the Music@Menlo Festival.

The program, presented in the Stent Family Hall of the Menlo School in Atherton, comprised two powerful works from 1945 – Britten’s “Holy Sonnets of John Donne” cycle and Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphosen” – as well as Shostakovich’s tormented, autobiographical Eighth String Quartet from 1960. In Wednesday’s first-rate performances, all three served as eloquent testaments of the period.

The great revelation was the Shostakovich, which opened the program in a marvelously sensitive and balanced performance by the Miró Quartet (violinists Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violist John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele). With its obsessive repetitions of the four-note melodic motif that denotes the composer’s initials, this is a piece that in the wrong hands can too often sound hectoring and solipsistic.

But the Miró lavished it with tenderness and delicacy, from the slow Beethovenian fugue that opens the work (rendered with rich, gorgeous tone) to the sardonic but light-footed waltz at its center. Suddenly, a piece whose emotional rawness had often struck me as embarrassing took on an arresting pathos.

Britten’s settings of Donne’s urgent, death-haunted poems – cast with fervent intensity amid a few rhapsodic interludes – got a formidable reading by tenor Matthew Plenk and pianist Ken Noda. Plenk, a young singer affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera, has the bright, piercing tone and flawless diction needed to make this music work, and he shaped the songs with dramatic sureness.

After intermission came a rarity, a mysterious alternate version of “Metamorphosen” scored for seven strings rather than the canonical 23. The septet, premiered in 1994, sustains the same elegiac tone over the destruction of German culture, symbolized by a melodic snippet from the funeral march of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.

But in packing that material into such a small instrumental space, Strauss necessarily keeps the entire ensemble in motion nearly without pause. The result feels overstuffed in a way that the standard version never does.

Still, the performance caught the music’s contrapuntal dexterity and rhythmic tirelessness, and the ensemble – comprising violinists Jorja Fleezanis and Lily Francis, violists Beth Guterman and Erin Keefe, cellists David Finckel and Ralph Kirshbaum, and bassist Scott Pingel – mustered a plush and evocative sound.

The works paired on the Miró Quartet’s new live recording are sonic travelogues by composers with America on their minds.  Dvořák composed his Quartet in F major, Op 96, while in residence in Spillville, Iowa, in 1893, and gave the piece the apt subtitle “American”.  Kevin Puts’s haunting Credo evokes images that inspired the American composer.

Thematic ties aside, both scores share an intense passion for the material at hand.  Dvořák’s quartet, full of folk references, needs treatment that acknowledges the nostalgic gestures without wallowing in sentimentality.  The Miró players give the work a reading of exceptional vibrancy, warmth and nuance.

Equally affecting is Credo, whose five connected movements salute people and locations that have made indelible impressions on Puts.  The opening movement pays tribute to a violin maker in Katonah, NY, from whose studio is conjured ethereal and fervent musings complete with excerpts from famous violin pieces.

As the music paints pictures of bridges in Pittsburgh, Puts builds motoric, overlapping and rhythmic statements suggesting the “Infrastructure” of the second movement’s title.  The propulsive activity, coloured by string harmonics, is interrupted by an intermezzo, “Learning to Dance”, which sings a lovely song of mother and daughter in tender motion.

The message of peace that lies at the heart of the score is embodied in the final “Credo”, an elegy of sublime beauty not far from the traditions of Beethoven and Mahler.  A more committed or detailed performance than the captivating one the Miró give would be hard to imagine.

From the August 2010 edition of Gramophone.

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It was just about a perfect concert for the Minnesota Beethoven Festival.

One of America’s best string quartets playing three Beethoven string quartets.

The Miró Quartet dazzled a crowd Thursday night with marvelous musicianship, technical virtuosity and precise ensemble work. This string quartet is dynamic, passionate and genuine in its interpretation of Beethoven’s quartets.

It was one of the best nights of quartet music I have had the pleasure to see in more than three decades. And, of course, the best way to reward an appreciative crowd is to play a slow, beautiful movement from another Beethoven work.

The great climax in the concert came with Beethoven’s 13th string quartet with the five “Grosse Fuge” movement added to the work. That movement was part of the original quartet, but was later published as a separate piece.

The movement was a delightful addition, showing off Miró’s mastery of the complicated tempo shifts and lovely lyricism. This Beethoven quartet is a true masterpiece, and Miró performed it with joy and bright intensity.

Miró also played Beethoven’s 11th and F major string quartets. What stood out with both quartets was Miró’s freshness and exuberance with a well-balanced sound, intonation and pretty phrasing.

The concert experience was sensational, but still the squeaky seats in St. Cecilia Theatre at Cotter High School pose a problem for intimate performances. The seats are uncomfortable and you are afraid to move an inch because you don’t want to ruin a musical moment.

It’s time to re-evaluate that venue.

But still, this has been a great Minnesota Beethoven Festival, and so far Yo-Yo Ma and the Miró Quartet have been its stars.

To read the entire review, please click here.

This recording of old and new string quartets will make you feel cheerful about American music, even though one of the pieces is by a European and the other uses Eastern gestures.  Both works evoke American landscapes, and both have an open sound that seems an indeliable part of American musical identity.

Kevin Puts’s 2007 Credo uses delicate harmonics, vibrato-free hymns, and exotic modes to beautiful effect.  I cringe when I read program notes about new pieces that promise “a tour of the places where I find solace and hope” and have movement titles like “The Violin Guru of Katonah”: please, not another New Age, World Music assemblage of cloying cliches.  This piece is pretty sugary, especially the finale, put Puts knows how to write a tune and how to produce wonderfully prismatic effects in the scherzo sections.  The opening movement combines both qualities in rapt solo lines and quietly racing traceries.  This haunting work sounds a bit like Hovhaness or Part but has its own serene personality.  It was written for the Miro Quartet, which plays it with breathtaking purity and poetry.

They use the same approach with Dvorak’s American Quartet.  I’ve never heard a performance so light, feathery, and full of open air.  Dvorak wanted this quartet to sound American, not European, and that is communicated here.  He wrote it in a three-day spurt of inspiration in Spillville, Iowa, and the Miro players make it sound spontaneous and joyful.  The opening movement sparkles and flows and is over before we know it; the slow movement, based on a Negro spiritual (a form that was not taken seriously until Dvorak’s New World Symphony) is full of aching lyricism and subtle phrasing.  He constructed II to sound like a Scarlet Tanager, and the Miro players do indeed sing it like a songbird.  The finale races to the finish line with pure joy, holding the last chord as if they don’t want the piece to end.

The Tokyo (Sony) and Cleveland (Telarc) quartets supply strong competition in this music, and I’ve always loved the spirited and warm-hearted Guarneri reading from 1972 (RCA).  None of these, however, have and attractive contemporary American piece on the same program.

This is the first installment of a new series called “The Miro Quartet Live”, taped before an audience at the University of Texas at Austin.  The engineers supply a warm acoustic with a sense of open space.