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Recent Press Quartet returns to brilliance By Mark Stryker/Free Press Music Writer Setting aside briefly the exquisite reading of Henri Dutilleux's spellbinding quartet, the most thrilling thing about the Tokyo String Quartet's concert Saturday was that the group sounded like the Tokyo String Quartet. This is news. The Tokyo quartet had always placed its biggest aesthetic bet on a remarkably homogenous and sumptuous tonal blend, instrumental finesse and a tasteful interpretive flair. When a new first violinist was needed in 1996, the group gambled on Mikhail Kopelman, hoping his Slavic pedigree might inject new energy and ideas into the dialogue. But a string quartet is a fragile balance of personalities, and the risk never paid off. Kopelman proved inconsistent and willful. The quartet lost its polished veneer without leveraging any compensatory artistry. Canadian Martin Beaver replaced Kopelman last year, joining violinist Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura and cellist Clive Greensmith. In its metro Detroit debut, this lineup took less than a minute to prove that the gods of chamber music had been satisfied. With Beaver's plush lyricism leading the way, Franz Schubert's E-flat Quartet, D. 87, sounded like a warm smile. All four parts snuggled indivisibly within the same footprint. The Tokyo quartet's elegant style is ideally suited to the seductive sound world of Dutilleux's 1976 masterpiece, "Ainsi la Nuit" ("Thus the Night"). Fragmentary gestures and glissandos -- many played with mutes or on the bridge for a mysterious effect -- dart through the ensemble. They collide, splinter and recombine in new constellations of sound. The seven movements unfolded like a hallucination -- Marcel Proust's stream-of-consciousness is an important influence -- and the quartet played with breathtaking control. To close, pianist Jon Kimura Parker joined the quartet for a surprisingly rip-snorting account of Brahms' F Minor Quintet. Spurred by Parker's impetuous phrasing, the quartet's volume and weight suddenly took on orchestral dimensions. Each movement increased in muscularity but never to the point of brutishness. |
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