The Juilliard School’s annual FOCUS! Festival of contemporary music, founded and directed by Joel Sachs, celebrated its 25th anniversary this year with a major premiere of a new string quartet by John Adams. The programs typically “focus” on a specific theme and/or composer, and FOCUS! 2009 was titled “California: a Century of New Music.” On January 29, the St. Lawrence Quartet—Geoff Nuttall and Scott St. John, alternating violins; Lesley Robertson, viola; and Christopher Constanza, cello—presented the premiere of the second full-length quartet by the San Francisco Bay Area resident.

String Quartet No. 2 has two substantial movements, one fast, one slow. The composer offered no program notes, wanting the music “to speak for itself.” Though the quartet includes quasi-romantic and popular elements, it is essentially minimalist with repeated short figures and riffs that serve to produce a long piece with very little material. The work’s most striking trait is its use of extreme contrasts. Dynamics range from secretive, muted whispers to bangs, crashes, and high-pitched screams. Textures include all kinds of sound effects and vary from scraping to singing. Expression goes from high-voltage intensity to tonal and rhythmic stasis.

The lively, energetic first movement is held together by the recurrence of the opening’s repetitive chugging figure. Stratospheric passages, wide leaps and jumps, and melodic and rhythmic unisons alternate with conversational give-and-take, creating a flowing, almost random structure.

The second movement features long sustained chords and democratically distributed solo lines.

The St. Lawrence’s players, led by Nuttall, seemed not only to possess the music, but to be possessed by it. Technically secure, they responded to the quartet’s swiftly changing moods, and heightening them with their own passion and exuberance. The musicians’ uninhibited body language is spontaneous, but distracting: Nuttall’s hair flies wildly, his legs are in constant motion, and all four toss their bows skyward.

Indeed, the whole concert was a visual as well as a musical experience. The four works on the program all required different instruments, keeping the stage crew very busy. Andrew Norman’s “Gran Turismo,” for eight violins, was a brilliant perpetual motion with solos for every player; Ingram Marshall’s “Fog Tropes,” was inspired by the Bay Area’s hazy atmosphere: a tape of fog-horns recorded there formed the background for six live brass instruments.

But the evening’s gentlest, most colorful sounds were created in Lou Harrison’s “Varied Trio” by a violin, a piano played both normally and by plucking the strings, and a formidable percussion battery, including porcelain bowls. The performers, students and alumni of Juilliard’s Pre-College Division, were uniformly excellent.

Mutter and NY Phil Mark Mendelssohn’s Birthday

The New York Philharmonic joined this year’s Mendelssohn celebrations on February 4, the day after his 200th birthday, with a series of concerts featuring his Violin Concerto (1844) and two less familiar works: the Overture to “Ruy Blas” (1839), and the cantata “The First Walpurgis Night” (1830, rev. 1844). The conductor was Kurt Masur, the orchestra’s music director emeritus and a long-time Mendelssohn champion; the soloist was Anne-Sophie Mutter, one of the most acclaimed virtuosos of our time, who has just released her second recording of the concerto in honor of the bicentennial.

Watching Mutter play is a pleasure, and not merely because she is beautiful. Her technique is effortless and natural; she seems to have four equally strong fingers that can stretch in every direction. Her bow arm is wonderfully relaxed, her motions are fluid and economical; her bow changes are smooth and inaudible; her tone is famous for its creamy luxuriousness.

She first played the Mendelssohn in her early teens and now brings to it total instrumental control and total emotional abandon. Her tempi were fast and driving. Taking the molto appassionato in Mendelssohn’s first movement tempo indication very literally, she made the opening theme all “sturm und drang,” even speeding up after the first statement. The tension rarely flagged. The slow movement sounded impatient rather than serene. The finale flew by like the wind, but, strangely enough, lost rather than gained lightness and charm. Her vibrato was unremittingly fast and intense, and she likes to turn it off and on suddenly for variety of color.

The performance was brilliant and exciting, but the work’s pensive lyricism and many details of phrasing and expression were lost.

The orchestra played beautifully, as always. The opening and frequently recurring brass choir in the highly dramatic overture sounded glorious; strings and winds interwove perfectly. In the cantata—set to Goethe’s ingratiating fable about a group of Druids who persuade their Christian adversaries that they all worship the same Universal Father with pure hearts—the musicians were joined by four splendid singers and the estimable Westminster Symphonic Choir for a wonderful performance.

At the end, Masur, who received a returning hero’s welcome, held up the score to let the composer participate in the audience’s ovation.
—E. E.

Gilles Apap & the Colors of Invention

On a cold night, on January 22, French violinist Gilles Apap brought his customary blend of virtuosity and humor to the Berlin Philharmonie’s Chamber Music Hall. Apap is probably best known for his wacky cadenza to Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G, in which he transforms Mozart’s themes into a blues song, an old-time fiddle tune, a Grappelli-style hot-club swing solo, a Scottish reel, a Gypsy dance, and a classical Indian improvisation, a feat that has garnered a cult following on YouTube.

He has been shaking up the classics with the late Sir Yehudi Menuhin’s blessing for the past ten years. This concert was no different. Taking the stage with his band the Colors of Invention (Philippe Noharet on bass, Myriam Lafargue on accordion, and Ludovit Kovac on cimbalom), Apap performed a potpourri of showpieces interspersed with a new arrangement of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin and folk music from Brittany, Ireland, and Bulgaria. Old favorites of the virtuoso repertory, like Manuel de Falla’s Spanish Dance, Kreisler’s Praeludium und Allegro, and Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, were delivered with sparkle and flair, if not the powerful projection we are used to hearing from leading American soloists.

The centerpiece of the program was Le tombeau de Couperin, imaginatively orchestrated for this group by the members themselves. The interplay of themes shared among the instruments resulted in surprising new textures that would surely have pleased Ravel, a virtuoso orchestrator (especially of his own piano music). And considering the French composer’s interest in jazz—just think of the blues movement in his Violin Sonata—he would probably have been more than a little amused by “Forlane” being jazzed up with semi-improvised vamps and grooves.

This is the kind of thing Apap does best—mixing it up and shaking it loose—so that, even though there were plenty of fireworks in Ravel’s Tzigane and Saint-Saens’s Introduction et rondo capriccioso, the most riveting moments were those where the boundary between folk fiddle and classical violin got blurred: who else could polish off Gypsy tunes, Tzigane, and Zigeunerweisen in a single evening? Versatility is Apap’s forte, with a dollop of wit and a cool California surfer vibe to boot—for which this audience showed plenty of excitement and enthusiasm judging by the shouts, spontaneous laughter, and numerous curtain calls.

Apap’s Berlin appearance followed hot on the heels of his visit to the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom, where he gave a solo recital of Bach, Ysaÿe, and fiddle tunes to an enthralled audience. For the concluding Irish jig, he was joined by student musicians on fiddle, guitar, and pipes. He also gave a master class in which he coached student performers and at one point demonstrated his party trick of balancing a spare bow vertically on the tip of his nose while playing Bach—to the amazement of all present.
Apap gave the impression that there’s nothing he can’t do—which makes him the very definition of a virtuoso.
—Mai Kawabata