STRING QUARTET, FLUTIST OFFER SUPERB PRECISION

Published: Sunday, October 22, 2006

By Jennifer Hambrick
For The Dispatch

Chamber Music Columbus launched its 2006-07 season last night at the Southern Theatre with a concert of new and familiar chamber works superbly performed by the Cypress String Quartet and Columbus flutist Katherine Borst Jones.

Jones joined Cypress Quartet second-violinist Tom Stone, violist Ethan Filner and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel in the program's first work, Mozart's Quartet in D major for Flute, Violin, Viola and Cello.

No stranger to the stages of Columbus' concert halls, Jones played with her usual professionalism in Mozart's ebullient work, most notably in the long-breathed flute solo of the quartet's second movement, Adagio. The third movement finale, Rondeau: Allegretto, bubbled with all the lightness of whipped cream.

Rejoined by first-violinist Cecily Wade, the Cypress Quartet played composer and Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty member Elena Ruehr's Quartet No. 4 as though it had been written for them -- which it was, on commission from the Cypress Quartet itself. The haunting, sinewy lines of the first movement, Sonata, highlighted the ideally matched sounds of the quartet's players.

The work's third movement, Minuet, echoed the best of the modern string quartet's repertory, with the jaunty, mixed-meter rhythms of Bartok injected into a harmonic world inspired by Debussy and Ravel. With impeccable precision, the Cypress captured the spirit of the work's finale as a dark parody of Beethoven's quartet writing, with its famed obsession for motivic development and its moments of introspective sentimentality.

The quartet's best playing of the evening came in Dmitri Shostakovich's Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 122. This work is more ideas and philosophy than notes on a page, and the players performed it as such, at times almost making themselves disappear, leaving behind only the essence of a thought or feeling. Their rendition of the work's first movement was pristine. The ensemble captured the third movement, Recitative, in all its sinister drama. The sixth movement, Elegy, was a profound and beautifully sustained statement of grief.

In Erwin Schulhoff's Five Pieces for String Quartet, a dance suite capturing the bleakness of the period between the two world wars, the Cypress Quartet concluded the program with, again, astonishing technical precision.

Reprinted with permission.