Remarkable evening of music

German clarinetist, Japanese quartet charm audience

David Gordon Duke, Special to The Sun

Published: Thursday, October 16, 2008

Friends of Chamber Music's 61st season continued Tuesday evening at the Vancouver Playhouse with an unusually fine concert, featuring distinguished German clarinetist Sabine Meyer and the Tokyo String Quartet playing in classic, romantic, and modern repertoire.

In the concert's first half the quartet performed early Beethoven -- his G major Quartet Opus 18, No. 2 -- and Bartok's Fifth Quartet. On paper these works might seem a slightly uneasy combination; in performance the Tokyo Quartet's consistency and clearly delineated attention to style made them entirely complementary. The Beethoven was given a measured, though lively, reading, entirely lacking in showy extravagances but with a deeply satisfying honesty and grace.

The same care and fastidiousness made for an enlightening approach to Bartok. The Hungarian master's wealth of folk-flavoured materials can be an excuse for rough, even sloppy playing. Here the ensemble treated this commanding Modern classic with a lucidity that would have well served Mozart or Haydn. All Bartok's dissonant intensity and rhythmic drive was present, but delivered with the utmost precision and clarity.

The second half of the program was devoted to Brahms' late Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, Opus 115. Although the Quintet's clarinet role is, undeniably, first among equals, Meyer obdurately refused to hog the limelight where a lesser musician might have turned the work into a solo vehicle. Her work was the epitome of fine chamber music playing, as expressive in a accompanying arabesque as in Brahms' soaring solo moments. The string players were just as impressive, reveling in the complex interchanges between instruments, always aware of the autumnal masterpiece's intricate, ever shifting textures.

The ensemble's balance, intelligence and style were beyond exemplary. Brahms' admirers could not have wished for a more achingly beautiful reading of the tender second movement Adagio, nor could they have heard a more graphic demonstration of how strong emotion shaped, and to a certain measure restrained, by the discipline of classic structure gives this great music both power and dignity. As the sombre concluding measures of the work ebbed into silence, Tuesday's audience seemed lost in contemplation, unwilling to accept that the remarkable evening of music making had, like all good things, come to an end.


© The Vancouver Sun 2008