Ariel Quartet's Beethoven Cycle at the SubCulture, with Energy to Spare
By David Allen
April 15, 2015
If the aristocratic salons of the late 18th and early 19th centuries have any equivalent today, it might be a place like SubCulture. At this little NoHo basement space, which has fast established itself as a major music presenter, there’s a tangible, deserved sense of pride.
Why? “The Cycle.”
If that billing sounds portentous, it’s not. Offering one program per month this season, the talented young Ariel Quartet has embarked on all 16 of Beethoven’s string quartets plus the “Grosse Fuge.” It’s the group’s second season playing with the whole set, and SubCulture’s first endeavor on this scale since its opening in 2013. On Tuesday evening I caught the seventh of eight concerts, which featured two quartets in F major, the first of both the Opus 18 and 59 batches.
Whether of symphonies, piano sonatas or these quartets, Beethoven cycles have become numbingly common, domesticating a composer whose music always longs to be radical. But the members of the Ariel — Gershon Gerchikov, Alexandra Kazovsky, Jan Grüning and Amit Even-Tov — have rebooted the idea: sitting in a full circle, dressing casually, performing in the round and at touching distance, all to bring Beethoven to life once more.
A little too alive, on this occasion. Certainly the group never stinted on Beethoven’s showiness in the opening movement of the Opus 18 quartet, and they found unsettling, pugnacious rage in the finale of the one from Opus 59, its Russian theme written in honor of Count Razumovsky, the czar’s ambassador to Vienna. Physicality was the name of the game, and the quartet never seemed happier than when darting forward as a group, attacking an accent together or swaying back to underline the full breadth of the slow movements.
The problem is that at such close quarters every misstep is magnified. Unruly intonation and square phrasing undercut moments of elegance a little too often. In my earlier visits to SubCulture I’d never thought the acoustics too challenging, but with the quartet’s bright tone and playing that rarely moved from the mezzo-forte-to-forte level, they sounded too constrained for proper appreciation. Perhaps it was just my seat — plenty in the capacity crowd hollered with joy.
