Source: The Globe and Mail
by Robert Everett-Green
You're at a family gathering, and someone comes in with a new partner. The party goes on much as before, except that everyone has an ear cocked for that one new voice.It was like that at Toronto's Jane Mallett Theatre on Thursday, as the St. Lawrence String Quartet played a recital with its latest cellist, Christopher Costanza. It was almost a year to the day after the quartet arrived at the same venue on the arm of another new cellist, Alberto Parrini, who split with the group at the end of August.For the Music Toronto crowd that packed the house, the St. Lawrence is family.
Some in the crowd have been listening to the group since it came together at the University of Toronto in 1989, and through its three-year stint as Music Toronto's quartet-in-residence (1995-1998). I doubt, however, that anyone came away rolling their eyes over the new alliance, as some do when a family member flits between partners. Costanza doesn't sound like he has always been a part of the quartet, but he does sound like he belongs there now.Chamber music is highly sociable, and Costanza clearly plays well with others. He was so responsive to his colleagues that his own personality was not easy to discern. He seemed more at ease with the broad naturalism of Dvorak's Quartet in C, Op. 61, than in the rarefied drawing-room environment of Ravel's Quartet in F, which opened the program. But he and and his colleagues (violinists Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman, and violist Lesley Robertson) were convincingly engaged with both works, and with what I would call the major music on the program, Osvaldo Golijov's Yiddishbbuk.
Golijov is a young Argentinian composer, now living in the U.S., with whom the members of the St. Lawrence struck a timely partnership a few years before he became an international star. They have recorded Yiddishbbuk and several others of his works (both disc and composer were nominated for a Grammy). It's a measure of their commitment that they would have their new cellist learn the piece almost from his first day on the job. For them, it's core repertoire.The piece is even more effective live than on disc. Golijov's music has a deep and complex connection to gesture and the body. Dancing and breathing are its life processes. This is all the more striking in Yiddishbbuk, which is music for the dead. At one moment you hear the ghosts of merriment; at the next, a whistling sound, as of the wind passing over a field of bones, or a droning like the prayers of those who are already forgetting the meaning of the words. It's all a jumble of living and dying, and of sad things that can be beautiful or defiant in the passing of a moment.In comparison, the Ravel seemed distant, like passion reviewed under glass. The eerie concordances of the slow third movement were a shade too pungent for maximum awe.
The Dvorak, coming last, was where it should be, like a ramble in the open air after a season of introspection. Chamber music is such a hard pursuit that pleasure in doing it becomes an absolute virtue, and it was good to see and feel that the newly configured St. Lawrence seems to enjoy playing together as much as the old.The St. Lawrence String Quartet plays at the University of Calgary (Calgary Pro Musica) on Monday, and at the Orpheum (with the CBC Orchestra) on Feb. 16.
