Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
by Peter McCallum
City Recital Hall
The St Lawrence String Quartet didn't so much begin this concert but fall into it, as though the frenetic extremis at the start of Osvaldo Golijov's Yiddishbbuk was a state of anguished disorder which had always been there waiting to enslave our attention.
And in a sense it has, in that this wild enactment of the extremes of Jewish culture begins by commemorating three child poets interned by the Nazis at Terezin. Yet while the mood is always obsessively intense, the expressive scope of the three movements is riveting, achieving in a short time an epic quality through the range and originality of its ideas and textures.
Each movement ends a long way from where it began, the first one subsiding to brooding tenseness, while the more reserved second (bearing initials of the Yiddish storyteller Isaac Singer) ends with a plucked chant broken off as though played from a torn manuscript. The final movement, invoking Leonard Bernstein, moves from an eerily sliding opening to perversely emphatic declamation, and the St Lawrence Quartet lived all of this with such vividness the memory of their playing lingers long after the event.
That quality is what sets them apart as one of the most memorable chamber music ensembles to visit in recent years. They writhe, they twitch, they wince at the intensity of a soft chord, and flow with the sweep of a phrase so that you scarcely notice their intonation and their sense of empathy and balance is impeccable. Like the Bebop players in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, or guitarists of the Hendrix generation, they seem on a search for "it", that moment of indefineable transcendent presence without ever violating the sacred vessel of long- range classical form.
That vessel was filled by two quartets of Shostakovich, the uneasy String Quartet No. 5, which moves between assertion and sometimes ironic sweetness, and the more extended String Quartet No. 3, written just after World War II, which raged wildly in the ferocious scherzo of the third movement, and ended with an ambiguous mix of exhaustion, relief and futility.
The St Lawrence String Quartet returns to City Recital Hall on September 21.
