Review from The Columbus Dispatch. Sunday, April 16, 2000.

Quartet hits high note at chamber society’s finale

By Ralph O’Dette
for The Dispatch

The American String Quartet with guest David Thomas, principal clarinetist of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, brought the 52nd season of the Columbus Chamber Music Society to a satisfying conclusion last night in the Southern Theatre. It seemed fitting that the staunch defender of the heart of classical music would offer Haydn, Mozart and Brahms to cap the current season.

The concert opened with Haydn's Quartet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 50, No. 4. This rare-for-Haydn minor-key piece is darker and more serious than most of the 83 quartets by the astonishingly productive composer.

The players invested the first movement with a kind of unsettling energy until near the end when the sun suddenly breaks through in a major key. The slow movement alternated shades of light and dark. The minuet males one marvel that Haydn wrote hundreds of the classic dances and made each one interesting and different. The finale was also different -- dramatic and a bit academic compared with the usual joyful dancelike finales by this composer.

In a program reordering, Mozart's marvelous Quintet in A Major, K. 581 followed the Haydn. The problem with this arrangement is that almost any music that follows the Mozart is a letdown. With Thomas in top form and the strings responding as though the five had always played together, this was a deeply satisfying performance. There is a brief descending scale passage in the fifth variation of the last movement that, for me, still  is heart-stopping after innumerable hearings. Ah, that Mozart.

The concluding Quartet in A Minor, Op. 51, No. 2 by Brahms cost its composer many hours -- years, in fact -- of revision before he finally published it. The players seemed transformed, so different was their sound with this vastly different music. Brahms' characteristics were all there: beautiful melodies, ingenious counterpoint, rich harmonies and the rhythmic complexity that foreshadowed 20th-century techniques. As idiomatically as the classical works had been presented, the Brahms was the quartet at its finest.

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