{"id":24991,"date":"2015-01-23T15:46:47","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T20:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=24991"},"modified":"2015-01-24T09:57:59","modified_gmt":"2015-01-24T14:57:59","slug":"concert-review-a-world-of-tenuously-balanced-intimacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2015\/01\/23\/concert-review-a-world-of-tenuously-balanced-intimacy\/","title":{"rendered":"CONCERT REVIEW | A World of Tenuously Balanced Intimacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Afiara
Afiara Quartet Photo Credit: Daniel Ehrenworth<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[Updated: January 24, 2015]<\/p>\n

Afiara String Quartet at\u00a0Mazzoleni Concert Hall in Ihnatowycz Hall, Wednesday, January 21, 2015<\/span><\/p>\n

The Afiara Quartet<\/a> has one of those reputations that immediately make them suspect. There\u2019s an almost universal stamp of approval for what they do, from festival, schools, and various other cultural institutions, that one might suspect them of being little more than masters of political machinations.<\/span><\/p>\n

After months of hearsay, I finally had a chance to see them in their element, at the Royal Conservatory of Music, where they are the Fellowship Quartet-in-Residence at The Glenn Gould School. Settling into the back few rows, I had an overview of audience, which seemed typical enough, with its unsurprising mix of students and seniors.<\/span><\/p>\n

My expectations of a competent but ultimately uninspired concert were immediately thwarted when cellist and ensemble front-man Adrian Fung, sporting a cast and riding some kind of scooter, silently zoomed from the wings to center stage. Then, after welcoming everyone to the concert, he proceeded to tell the audience he had achieved one of life goals the night before, by appearing on The Discovery Channel with his fly down. Not something we\u2019re likely to hear from any of the guys in the Emerson Quartet. Just saying.<\/span><\/p>\n

What followed I can only describe as joyful, generous music making. Over the next hour and a half, the Afiara Quartet exemplified the best of what makes chamber music so special; world-class soloists choosing to join forces to explore a world of tenuously balanced intimacy. You couldn\u2019t find a more exemplary group of musicians to proselytize the virtues of why we still need to engage with the repertoire written two violins, viola and cello. Clearly a group that displays great affection for each other onstage, you have the feeling that they are quite aware that the whole is greater than the sum of their parts.<\/span><\/p>\n

One the program were three very different works: Anton Webern\u2019s Langsamer Satz (1905), Joseph Haydn\u2019s <\/span>Quartet in C Major Op.50 No.2 (1787) and Felix Mendelssohn\u2019s Quartet in A minor, Op.13 (1827).<\/span><\/p>\n

Webern\u2019s Langsamer Satz is an early work by a composer still struggling to find his voice. Webern was in his first year of studies with Arnold Schoenberg, whose late-Romantic masterpiece Verkl\u00e4rte Nacht looms large over the work of his student. Schoenberg\u2019s chamber tone-poem unfolds over 25 minutes, but Webern seems intent on compressing an equal amount of angst and emotion into a work lasting less than half the time. Even though the work begins with a long, heart-felt melody, the ensuing changes of mood and texture can seem jarring without the sufficient time to make seamless transitions between sections. If you have a look at some of your teen-age love letters, you\u2019ll have a sense of what I\u2019m talking about.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Afiaras did the best they could with the material, with Valeria Li, first violin, conveying a sense of all-encompassing, infinitely expanding longing in the work\u2019s opening few measures. Eric Wong, violist, didn\u2019t shy away from ferociously attacking his tremolos, and more often than not, he seemed to lead from the middle, unafraid to lean into the darker colours of his instruments, balancing out the overly familiar timbres of violins and cello to create a rich palette of hues from which to draw on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hadyn\u2019s Opus 50 quartets are staggering achievements in the realm of \u201cideas as music\u201d. While one can certainly enjoy these works from a purely sonic perspective, Haydn treats his thematic material almost like three-dimensional blocks, and you can feel the composer\u2019s endless sense of joy in rearranging and reexamining these blocks from all sides. What was once a beginning is now an ending. What seemed balanced was actually totally off-kilter, just waiting for you to notice gravity\u2019s pull on the precarious arrangement of material. But the blocks never come crashing down like in Beethoven. Haydn simply nudges what was teetering back into place, lulling you into a false sense of security, all the while preparing his next bit of mischief without you noticing what around the corner.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course you all know this, otherwise you wouldn\u2019t be reading this blog, but going over all of this is of some importance in understanding the Afiara\u2019s execution of this quartet. There was a nimbleness and lightness of touch that the musicians displayed that the work\u2019s formal eccentricities were laid bare for anyone to hear with open ears. Timothy Kantor really shone in this works, mindfully balancing his second violin duties around the other three players. There\u2019s no doubt that Kantor can lead or support his fellow musicians, but it takes real virtuosity to occupy the space between leading or supporting, where your role is in a state of constant transition, which is precisely what makes Haydn\u2019s music so challenging for musicians of any era.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mendelssohn\u2019s Quartet in A minor is nothing short of a masterpiece, and the Afiaras rose to the challenge. Responding to the example of Beethoven\u2019s late quartets, Mendelssohn scope of expression and depth of feeling rival the earlier master\u2019s greatest achievements. And like Beethoven, Mendelssohn even has text enter this instrumental work, quoting from an earlier song of his. The three-note motive associated with the words \u201cIs it true?\u201d keep popping up in all of the movements, begging us to question what truth the composer was seeking. All four members of the quartet gave their all to this work, not only delivering a cogent and thoughtful reading, but so perfectly executing Mendelssohn\u2019s perfectly scored textures that I find myself daydreaming over and over again about the sound of those instruments, the sound of those sumptuously orchestrated chords.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure if they intended it, but at the end of the program, I wondered if they had selected these works as a kind of manifesto on composition. The post-adolescent passion of Webern, when imbued with the formal mastery of Haydn, could result in an almost perfect work of art like the Mendelssohn. There are some many textural similarities between the Webern and Mendelssohn, I can\u2019t help but think this kind of pairing was purposeful.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their encore, a work unknown to me, arranged by Fung, sounded like something out of a Tarantino movie, replete with Flamenco chord progressions and spaghetti-western whistling; it was a fitting end to a fun night out the Afiara. I highly recommend catching them the next time they’re in town.<\/span><\/p>\n

Menon Dwarka<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Afiara Quartet has one of those reputations that immediately make them suspect. There\u2019s an almost universal stamp of approval for what they do, from festival, schools, and various other cultural institutions, that one might suspect them of being little more than masters of political machinations…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":24993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[118,76,19,52],"tags":[182],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/01\/afiara_TUNG-RCM0739_3.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-6v5","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24991"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24991"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25024,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24991\/revisions\/25024"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24991"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=24991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}