Tulsa World

April 12th, 2010

Roll over, Beethoven: This quartet rocks By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer

The Cavani String Quartet's performance is seamless.

A lot of Beethoven, a bit of Bach-infused Mozart and a touch of the blues made up the musical offering of the Cavani String Quartet on Sunday at the Tulsa PAC.

This Naumberg Award-winning ensemble — the final guest artists of Chamber Music Tulsa's current season— performed two of Beethoven's massive Op. 59, or "Rasumovsky," quartets, the No. 1 in F Major, and the No. 2 in E Minor.

The group last year completed a series of concerts in which they performed the complete cycle of Beethoven quartets. And one could sense that in the way the players approached this music.

Their performances gave the impression of this music not being an isolated creation, but part of an ongoing process — a conversation between composer and performer.

For example, there were passages in both quartets — in the final movement of the F Major, and the third movement of the E minor — of music that sounded deliberately ugly. And the Cavani quartet's playing of these passages almost reveled in that harshness, in these affronts to harmony, because that represented an aspect of Beethoven's own character.

And when pure beauty was necessary, as in the long, slow second movement of the E Minor quartet with its heartbeat rhythms and gently unwinding melodies, the quartet more than delivered (even if someone's cell phone tried to get in the last note as this movement faded to silence).

But maybe the most impressive thing about Sunday afternoon's concert was the seamless interaction among violinists Annie Fullard and Mari Sato, violist Kirsten Docter and cellist Merry Peckham.

This quartet is truly a gathering of equals. Each player maintained a distinctive voice — Sato may have been in the second violinist's chair, but unlike some in that position she definitely was not playing "second fiddle" — even within the ensemble passages.

They opened the concert with Mozart's Adagio and Fugue for Strings in C Minor, a brief and delightful little piece in which Mozart captured the essence, if not the complexity, of a Bach fugue.

For an encore, the quartet performed "Midnight Child" by Charles Washington, a piece that melds folk, spiritual, blues and jazz, and gave each performer the chance to show off with a little improvisation (or at least, written music that sounded a lot like it was improvised).

And this piece drew from the audience a comment one often doesn't hear at chamber music concerts, but it fit this one perfectly: "Cool!"

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