San Antonio Express-News

April 25, 2006

Cavani Quartet's Repertoire a "Fugue Fiesta' by Mike Greenberg, Senior Critic

The Cavani String Quartet did nothing halfway in its concert Sunday afternoon for the San Antonio Chamber Music Society.

The troupe played fearlessly in rarefied works from the summit of the repertoire, by Mozart, Bartok and Beethoven. And if one fugue is great, four must be greater - a veritable "fugue fiesta" as violinist Annie Fullard told the audience in Temple Beth-El.

The program's capstone was the "Great Fugue," restored to its proper place as the sixth and final movement of Beethoven's late Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130.

The "Great Fugue" is a paradox - an unruly, fractious, sprawling eruption, uncontained within the most tightly ordered of musical forms. It could be a musical evocation of Shelley's great poem "Mont Blanc" of a few years earlier, where woods and winds contend and a river bursts and raves, all in iambic pentameter.

The Cavani tore into this music with a slashing fury, happily tossing aside the creamy warmth and intimacy that had characterized most of the concert to that point.

The preceding five movements are scarcely less strange, and the Cavani preserved its strangeness, often through understatement. Dynamics were skewed to the quiet side and tempos were generally slow, but a superb sense of line kept the music buoyant and alive.

Bartok's Quartet No. 3, whose density and concision make it in some ways the most challenging of Bartok's six essays in this form, shone in a performance of great lyricism mixed with untethered intensity. The sliding notes, which abound in this work, were beautifully realized.

The Cavani opened and closed with Mozart - the Adagio and Fugue in C Minor to start, and the fugal final movement of the Quartet in G, the first of Mozart's six quartets dedicated to Haydn, as a generous encore.

Fullard's partners were violinist Mari Sato, violist Kirsten Docter and cellist Merry Peckham. Each maintained individual character in tone and phrasing even while forming a fully unified ensemble. The troupe projected great presence and conviction throughout.