Critical Acclaim for our 2006-07 Season
The Washington Post
Monday, April 16. 2007; Page C07
by Robert Battey
The Boston-based Borromeo String Quartet, having just won a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, closed out the Dumbarton Concert Series on Saturday with one of the season's highlights -- music by Shostakovich, Beethoven and local boy wonder Tudor Dominik Maican. Aside from superb intonation and a wide dynamic range, the quartet manages to convey newness and surprise in familiar music without its appearing contrived. The players communicate on a molecular level; every detail has been worked out to fit the overall interpretation, and every phrase adds to or draws meaning from the previous one.
Maican's Quartet No. 2 was written last year when the composer was all of 17. At this point, it is not an exaggeration to say he has everything: idiomatic string writing; concise, goal-directed forms; good balance of rhythmic and melodic elements; and organic progression of ideas. He still lacks a distinctive voice, but so did every great composer other than Mendelssohn at that age. It will be fascinating to see what becomes of this gifted artist.
The Shostakovich Fifth Quartet was visceral, dramatic and unsettling. In the Beethoven Quartet, Op. 132, , while the climax of the "Heiliger Dankgesang" movement was not elemental enough -- too polite -- the rest of the performance was beyond praise. The group, for once, made sense of the overly repetitive second movement, giving it a coherent narrative, and the gnarly, ungrateful string writing in the finale emerged with clarity and purpose.
The Washington Post
Monday, January 22, 2007; Page C05
by Joan Reinthaler
You might think that discipline, passion and impetuousness inhabit different universes, but the St. Petersburg String Quartet has morphed the three into a powerful musical persona. The group's program on Saturday at Georgetown 's Dumbarton Concerts in Dumbarton United Methodist Church was well geared to display the many facets of its personality.
The concert opened with "Oriental," the second of Glazunov's Five Novelettes, a happy romp through a romantic's vision of the East that sounded more like a Western hoedown than an exotic fantasy. Its foot-stomping rhythms kept intricate textures in line and subtle sonorities in focus. It began with such a sense of motion that the listener felt as if this were something that had been going on for a while, and this momentum never quit.
The first, and lesser-known, of Borodin's Quartets is a compendium of musical devices, full of fugal snatches, passages in ringing harmonics and romantic lyricism. It is a little too long, too repetitious and too obvious but, played as well as it was on Saturday, it can be great fun. Individual lines had an opportunity to emerge, and violinists Alla Aranovskaya and Alla Krolevich, violist Boris Vayner and cellist Leonid Shukayev, who in ensemble were so ideally matched, proved also to have strong and interesting individual personalities.
Clarinetist Teddy Abrams, a 19-year-old Curtis Institute student who has played with the SPSQ for two years, joined the others for a gorgeous, well-shaped reading of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. The first movement seemed deliberate, its occasional pauses opportunities for reflection and rededication. Abrams molded his lines with exquisite control of both dynamics and intensity (the latter especially) and moved in and out of the spotlight smoothly and with splendid artistry.