Word: quartetting
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...Borromeo Quartet, Boston's young bid for chamber music superiority, gave a triumphal and absolutely unpretentious performance at the Isabelle Stewart Gardener Museum on Sunday...
...Quartet began with a brilliant and invigorating reading of Haydn's Quartet in D Major, Op. 76, No. 5. Their first impression held ture throughout the concert--that of a group able to convey wild abandon while retaining complete control of a work. The Borromeo have created a rare middle ground between, for example, the devouring intensity of the Emerson Quartet and the extreme refinement of the Cleveland Quartet. Still, the most incredible revelation was yet to come...
When cellist Yeesun Kim entered with the quartet's second motive, she introduced the audience to a mode of playing that can only be called chamber music perfection. Kim's bow moved so immaculately that one could not tell if it actually touched the string; from the listener's perspective, there was only a pristine sound that came from her direction. Moreover, Kim's ironclad intonation placed her in a class of her own. Her sound suits the medium perfectly--not overly soloistic, yet unquestionably striking. She is surely the most outstanding cellist in chamber music today...
...classical work thinned to only one or two instruments, the players failed to fill the space left by the tuttis. Despite the intimacy of these solo and quasi-solo sections, the instruments must expand their scope to aid the continuity of the piece; one should still feel that a quartet is on the stage...
...Quartet next presented "The Drinking Gourd," the final movement of Marty Ehrlich's String Quartet (1993). According to Ehrlich, the movement gets its name from a slogan of the Underground Railroad, "follow the drinking gourd." At first, it sounds like a syncopated roundance in uneven time. Much of its inspiration appears drawn from the stark landscapes that Barto'k portrayed in his string music. Soon, the cello enters with a jazz vamp, introducing the genre in which Ehrlich is most at home...