NEW ADVENTURES FOR MARC-ANDRÉ HAMELIN AND THE DORIC STRING QUARTET
Marc-André Hamelin (piano); Doric String Quartet [Alex Redington and Ying Xue (violins), Hélène Clément (viola), John Myerscough (cello)]: Music of Sibelius, Hamelin and Dvořák, Playhouse, February 16, 2020.
The 40th anniversary season of the Vancouver Recital Society has already brought back many esteemed artists who have appeared in the organization’s past. This time, it was Marc-André Hamelin and the Doric String Quartet, who have visited frequently on their own but never together. The Doric’s wonderfully clean tonal blend and transparency have served repertoire from Haydn to Schubert extremely well, and they’ve recently moved forward to composers such as Janáček, Walton and Britten. They also added new second violin, Ying Xue, in 2018. Here they gave a tightly-etched and insightful performance of the Sibelius quartet ‘Voces Intimae’. Unusually warm and flowing pianism from Hamelin joined with the quartet’s energy in the famous Dvořák Piano Quintet, a performance of contrast and dramatic power though not one that fully realized the composer’s special lyricism. The big surprise was Hamelin’s own Piano Quintet, a half-hour piece that resembled more of a rhapsodie-fantasie than a conventional tight-knit exercise in this genre.
It was the transparency of the Doric’s reading of the Sibelius that was distinctive, yielding fresh perspectives. Textures were lean, and the cleanness of the voicings and perception of the composer’s unique (and often symmetric) building blocks yielded a thoroughly concentrated and integrated result. The ensemble found airiness and sparkle early on, but also hinted at the folk roots that become more explicit in the Allegretto fourth movement. The Adagio was done beautifully, featuring a most sensitive interplay between the instruments and a full appreciation of the speaking pianissimos from which the work gets it title. Above all, there was intimacy here, and in the subsequent movement too, which set up the sharper, more robust energy of the finale. In the combination of astringency and feeling, I was at times reminded of the Britten quartets, something I had not previously recognized. I might also note that Ying Xue’s violin runs in the Allegretto left no doubt as to how formidable a player she is, and how much she adds to the ensemble’s overall synergy.
The tightness of the Doric’s playing did not suit the Dvořák Piano Quintet as well. The group tended to dichotomize moments of strong energy from the composer’s pensive musings, while not quite finding a lyrical affability and delight in between. Hamelin’s piano underwrote more of the warm coaxing flow that one identifies with the composer, suggesting a slight discrepancy in approach. Playing the work’s introduction very slowly and softly, then moving so tenaciously into the Allegro, did not strike me as ideal. The opening theme should be direct, positive and feeling (not slow and not withdrawn), just like the introduction of the companion Symphony No. 8 Op. 88. At the same time, articulation should never be acerbic in the passages of vigour and energy: there is still a lyrical roundness of phrase that needs to be implied. Accordingly, the opening Allegro came off as dramatic, but lacking pliability and affection. The best playing was in the Dumka, patient, searching and demonstrably in touch with the composer’s melancholy, with Hamelin opening up a fine feeling of contemplative space and lovely viola playing from Hélène Clément. Though the pianist continued to court a degree of breadth and charm, the quartet returned to its more brusque, spiky style for the final movements. The Scherzo had scintillating attack but did not find full suspension of its phrases. The quick pace of the last movement gave it a more insistent demeanour, but I was disappointed that the sheer joy of the dancing Czech rhythms was not more pronounced, and that the soft, touching dumka at the close did not descend on the music as lovingly as it can.
The big surprise of the afternoon was Hamelin’s own piano quintet. It was a surprise, first and foremost, because no one had heard it before but also because it was so echt-romantic, which seemed to contrast markedly with the pianist’s reputation for forbidding analytical precision. This dichotomy is perhaps not uncommon: Richard Strauss was a wonderfully precise, almost classical, conductor, but witness the luxuriance in his music. Hamelin has composed some extremely difficult smaller pieces for piano, but this seems to be one of his first ventures into large scale writing with other instruments.
While a definite adventure, I admit that I didn’t get many new feelings from this composition. It seemed more of a nostalgic recollection of Gallic romantic/rhapsodic writing at the end of the 19th century, augmented by modernist piano innovations and various theatrical gestures. The opening movement pays a large structural and emotional debt to César Franck’s Piano Quintet (1880), a work that introduced a more indulgent type of angst and melancholy than was common at the time, and anticipated some of the vivid post-romantic imagery of Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, and others. Saint-Saëns naturally disowned it at its premiere. Perhaps this interest fits with Hamelin’s acknowledgment that ‘the turn of the twentieth century … was one of the most fascinating and radically innovative periods in music history.’
While Franck often employed cyclical development, Hamelin was more linear and evolutionary in his approach, creating a feeling of a rhapsodie-fantasie that moves on and on. There are three movements. While one supposes that there can be many models for a piano quintet, a notable feature was how often the piano writing was soloistic and separated from the quartet’s contribution; I might have welcomed tighter integration both harmonically and rhythmically. Nonetheless, given the rhapsodic passions of the music, I was certainly in the mood to find something individual – even if strange and haunting – in the feelings created. But everything seemed to be presented very much in the light of day: Hamelin relied so heavily on a standard tool kit of constructional and dramatic devices (sforzandi, tremolos and the like) that it was difficult to feel a special aura or suspension. The Passacaglia second movement had potential yet its romanticism seemed slightly generic, and the violent string slashes at its climax were too cinematic for my taste. The finale had a whole section devoted to the string quartet alone (something I have rarely encountered) but its trajectory seemed on the laboured side. Though it is impossible to fully absorb a 29-minute work on one hearing, my inclination is that the piece needs to be tightened and shortened, first, to make its instrumental density greater and, second, to allow an absolutely crystalline delineation of its message.
© Geoffrey Newman 2020