Source: The Globe and Mail
by Tamara Bernstein
The St. Lawrence String Quartet at Walter Hall in Toronto on Monday
If classical music mattered as much as hockey or basketball in this country, the newspaper headlines would be trumpeting, "St. John traded to Stanford! Banff nabs Shiffman! Toronto left scrambling!"
Instead, a large audience came to Walter Hall and held its collective breath as the St. Lawrence String Quartet gave its first Canadian concert since Scott St. John replaced second violinist Barry Shiffman, who left last month to head the Music and Sound department at the Banff Centre. Of course, St. John was already part of the family, both for the audience and the SLSQ: He has played with the quartet many times, and even (as we learned on Monday) played quartets briefly with first violinist Geoffrey Nuttall when they were children in London, Ont.
Until last month, St. John headed the University of Toronto's stringed-instrument department; technically, he is on a one- year leave of absence from that post. (No one gives up tenure lightly, and the SLSQ is only on a five-year contract at Stanford University.) But within a few electrifying measures of the opening work on Monday's concert -- Haydn's Quartet in G Major, Op. 77 No. 1, it was clear that after just five weeks, St. John has slipped, seemingly effortlessly, into the group, whose other members are violist Lesley Robertson and cellist Christopher Costanza. At the same time, while it's too early to say precisely how, it's clear that St. John will change the group significantly.
St. John's allegiances of timbre lay unabashedly with the viola on Monday, and his robust sound gave a new presence to the inner lines. An extraordinarily alert and passionate chamber musician, St. John made the second violin a true equal to the first. And in the SLSQ, that is of particular interest. Nuttall is an ecstatic, and his music-making is rooted in the extraordinary vocal quality he brings to his playing. When he plays a melody -- his sweetly plangent passages in the slow movement of the Haydn are a perfect example -- you sense that he's engaging in a quasi-mystical effort to "become" a singer; as a result, his relationship with the violin has the complexity of a sorcerer conjuring unseen spirits.
Shiffman had the knack of setting Nuttall totally free. And while St. John is a thrilling addition to the group, I felt that he and Nuttall had not quite reached that comfort point on Monday. But that's hardly surprising after just five weeks; in the large picture, the new chemistry is enormously promising. And perhaps I'm the one who has to get used to the change.
In the meantime, the concert was vintage SLSQ: visceral and passionate, yet rooted in a ferocious attention to the details of the score. Musical events don't merely succeed one another in an SLSQ performance: Each one causes the next -- as when Nuttall squeezed a melodically tight figure in the Haydn, then made the expanded passage that followed a longed-for release.
Their performance of Ravel's String Quartet was deeply and poignantly sensual, full of colours, and unflinching when the composer plunges into the realm of nightmare. In the first movement, melodies or ideas kept dissolving, as in a dream; in the finale, this sense of instability reached near chaos, as if the composer were hurling shards of melody onto a cubist musical canvas. In the third movement the performers made time itself slow down, as if trying to hang onto a lost dream. Nuttall's soft high passage was thrillingly improvisatory; Robertson's "recitative" seemed to come from another world.
The slow movement of Shostakovich's Quartet No. 7 -- a memorial to his first wife -- was haunting in a different way: Two spirits seemed to wander around in an endless search, but it was eerily uncertain who was searching for whom or if anyone was searching for anyone.
As to U of T's likely loss of St. John -- he will let them know on Dec. 1 whether he's returning -- there's a very elegant solution: If U of T keeps St. John's tenure position open and raises the money to endow three more, it can repatriate the whole quartet.
