From Rare to Well-Done

An institutional rarity, the Ives String Quartet is its own nonprofit corporation, and produces its own "Home Series" Bay Area season of concerts. Currently, these include three programs played twice, at St. Mark's Church in Palo Alto and at Le Petit Trianon Theatre in San Jose. The paid staff are the musicians themselves, answerable to a volunteer board of directors.

Many of those directors turned out for Sunday's San Jose appearance, a program titled "Viva Italia!" that included rare and extremely rare works representing the North of that storied land. The rare takes account of the Quartet in E Minor by Verdi, virtually an étude in search of fresh ideas for future operas. Extremely rare describes the other two works, Gian Francesco Malipiero's Rispetti e strambotti and Frank Bridge's Quartet No. 1 in E Minor. One of a handful of Italian composers in the early 20th century who sought to revive the Italian Baroque masters of concerto and sonata and apply their spirit to a new wave of instrumental literature, Malipiero took the name for his 1920 quartet from early Italian verse forms, respectively love poems and simple refrain poems or songs. The resulting work made for some of the most intriguing and challenging listening of the evening. Anyone in search of such familiar chamber music landmarks as sonata form and thematic development was stymied. Across some 20 "stanzas" (and 23 minutes) two "themes" recurred, often without plain delineation. The unattributed program notes supplied concise guidance: "The opening 'tuning-up' figure in the violin punctuates the piece like a 'ritornello,' according to the composer; and a later quiet, chorale-like fragment concludes the three main divisions. Throughout, the distinctions between dance- and song-related episodes are clearly heard in contrasting moods and rhythms." The work's vibrant spirit was aptly described as "kaleidoscopic and hedonistic." A prominent viola solo sang out in the early moments, with a violin solo to follow in kind on the low strings. Those, along with heavy pesante and drone textures, pizzicato accompaniments, and some ecstatic virtuosity, conspired to give the piece its fantastic character. Enhancing this in the middle section, the main theme more or less disintegrates among the four instruments, which begin talking to themselves instead of each other. The piece is ostensibly tonal, but an improvisatory polyphony pretty well obviates the question. At the end, however, a sense of the archaic hangs in the memory and warms the appetite for hearing more Malipiero.

Flattering the Viola

The Bridge piece carries the nickname "Bologna," having won a prize at a competition there in 1906. It subscribes to the familiar classical template, with an Adagio leading to an Allegro appassionato first movement, a large-scale Adagio molto second, a scherzolike Allegretto grazioso, and an Allegro agitato finale, in sonata form (like the first movement). Bridge flatters the viola, his own instrument, but spreads the good tunes around, as well. He recalls themes and mottoes from earlier in the codas of the movements and recycles good ideas between them. The first movement ends with a dramatic flourish. The solo cello gets a fine aria at the climax of the slow movement and mutters — almost whispers — the last word all alone at the end of the knockabout finale. The members of the Ives Quartet — violinists Bettina Mussumeli and Susan Freier, violist Jody Levitz, and cellist Stephen Harrison — warmed themselves up nicely in the Malipiero and flowered further in the Bridge. (Freier and Harrison both played in the Stanford Quartet.) Their programming makes a point of including rare and unusual repertoire alongside familiar fare; current projects include a recording of the Quincy Porter quartets for Naxos, with another volume due out shortly. Their sound is good in the Le Petit Trianon Theatre, which is famous for its lively acoustics, even though the space itself doesn't seem large enough for the treasure it gives back. The evening ended with Verdi's Quartet in E Minor of 1873, a piece that harks back to Rossini even as it anticipates potential new paths for the composer who already had Aïda and Don Carlo behind him. Like the Bridge, it found its own path through the Viennese model, but without any other concession to the German-speaking musical traditions. Even the final Scherzo fuga brings levity of spirit to a startlingly assured piece of counterpoint, disclosing years earlier exactly the technique Verdi would revisit so brilliantly in the finale of his Falstaff. The Prestissimo third movement cavorted like Mendelssohn's fairy music, if not with the same fragile lightness, while pizzicato on three strings surrounded an otherwise unknown (to me) baritone cabaletta on the cello.