Ariel Quartet took audience along on a thrill ride
The Calgary Pro Musica season opened last weekend with a pair of concerts by the Ariel Quartet, a group that is also the resident faculty quartet at the large and prestigious Cincinnati College-Conservatory in Ohio.
Given their youthful appearance and manner, it is hard to imagine these are 20-year veterans of the concert circuit. Following numerous competition successes, including The Banff International String Quartet Competition, the group has gone on to establish itself as a significant actor in the world of touring string quartets — a significant accomplishment in a highly competitive business.
“A blazing, larger-than-life performance” is how The Washington Post described one of their concerts, and to judge from this concert the description of the quartet’s performing persona is apt.
This is a high-energy quartet, even in the wider context of North American professional quartets. And in music that is written in an in-your-face fashion, this mode of delivery works well. This made the Mendelssohn Quartet in D major, Op. 44, No. 1, that concluded the concert the most compelling work on the program, at least as performance.
The breathless speed of the opening, with its frantic scrubbing from the lower strings, gave the performance a wonderful sense of being on a thrill ride, where one exciting thing after another happens. All the members of the quartet gave their best, their flat-out style of performing evidently a joy for them and for the audience: it was impossible not be swept along by the youthful verve of it all.
The concert also contained the Canadian premiere of the sixth (and presumably last) quartet by the distinguished American composer John Harbison, now roughly 80 years old. Harbison is rooted in “tradition,” at least as it concerns his string quartets, the mantle of the six Bartok quartets clearly on his mind. This final quartet, rather like the final quartet of Bartok, is really a meditation on the world of the string quartet, concerned with its distinctive textures, with complex thematic writing, and an internality in its emotional world.