QUATUOR ARTHUR-LEBLANC
Presented by Music Toronto
At the Jane Mallett Theatre
in Toronto on Tuesday
The Quatuor Arthur-LeBlanc seems to inhabit a quintessentially Gallic tradition. The quartet, named for the distinguished Acadian violinist, was crisp technically, secure and balanced musically, and had a clear, explicit, deeply serious but rather cool approach to the music it played Tuesday for Music Toronto.
It gave us Elements, by U.S.-born Canadian composer Elizabeth Raum; the tragic Thirteenth Quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich; and the first of Beethoven's phenomenal Rasumovsky quartets.
The Raum is an attractive, euphonious work, polished and able, but perhaps it was unfortunate to be sharing a bill with the mature utterances of two of the quartet genre's particular giants. I enjoyed the harmonic fluency and sweetness of Raum's musical fabrics and her command of string idioms. What was strikingly absent, in comparison with either the powerful and lavish Beethoven or the bleak, mordant Shostakovich, was a sense of strong individual profiles set off clearly against a spacious minimum of fuss and clutter.
Raum's impressions of the four elements - fire, water, air and earth - sounded remarkably alike. Indeed, the first section, fire, seemed to empty her entire bag of ideas, textures, harmonies and string colorations at the first shake. This, despite a conscientious and immaculate performance.
The Shostakovich, with vastly fewer notes, made a far more indelible impression. It's a work of introverted but intense feeling, with a special emphasis on the quiet, dark-hued eloquence of the viola, which opens and ends the five connected sections. The Arthur-LeBlanc players - Brett Molzan and Hibiki Kobayashi, violins; Jean-Luc Plourde, viola; and Ryan Molzan, cello - negotiated its heights and depths and anxieties with intense understanding.
The Beethoven, after intermission, brought the evening to a rich and complex conclusion. There is so much original and varied musical invention in every bar of Beethoven's grand, dynamic four-movement pattern, the listener's mind is kept breathlessly occupied. No matter how often you hear it, this music picks you up and carries you with it.
The Quatuor Arthur-LeBlanc had a sure, sophisticated, non-histrionic grip on the work and won an ovation for it.
For an encore, it wound down with a smooth quartet arrangement of jazzman Thelonious Monk's Around Midnight.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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