Source: The Star
With all that commotion, Nuttall of the St. Lawrence Quartet seems a little high strung
by WILLIAM W. STARR
The tradition of chamber music is stillness and decorum.
And then there's violinist Geoff Nuttall, a poster boy for the chronically mobile.
On stage, he's a flibbertigibbet, all arms and legs, motion, movement, up and down, side to side, breathing audibly. In some fast passages, he seems almost to levitate off his seat.
"The music is so full of life, and the crowds sometimes can be so stodgy," Nuttall says. "It's a weird juxtaposition. When you're playing (Schoenberg's) 'Verlke Nacht,' it makes the Beastie Boys look like early Mozart. You want to respond to the music because the music couldn't be more over the top - like rock 'n' roll, where nothing is held back."
His answers come out thoughtfully, a measured adagio, a moment of repose in a hectic sonata.
"I wish I didn't distract some listeners, and I really respect their concerns. But you know," he adds, "(expletive) happens."
Meet the 36-year-old first violinist for the 12-year-old St. Lawrence String Quartet, a foursome that has become the brightest rising star in the world of chamber music. A free spirit, Nuttal is the guy who clicks on ESPN when the quartet is on the road so he can watch the hockey game. The guy who's always looking for a pickup basketball game. The guy who admits that he loves to have a few glasses of wine to relax at receptions after a concert.
"Nuttall either slouched in his chair as if the music were draining him of energy," wrote a New York Times critic, "or seemed on the verge of leaping across the stage."
Nuttall admits he gets "a few" letters every year from people upset about his presumed lack of decorum on stage. By far, more people respond in the way of chamber music fan Robert Medlock of Columbia.
"Like tears or sweat or goose bumps, his physical action gives visual credence to the passion we hear coming from his instrument," Medlock once wrote.
With a major-label recording contract, high-level management, a year-round residency at Stanford University, a profile in The New Yorker magazine and growing demand for appearances throughout the United States and abroad, Nuttall and his quartet members have become a hot item.His hair awry and wearing a yellow print beach shirt, shorts and sandals, Nuttall easily could be mistaken for a surfer. Until, that is, he picks up the violin and begins making breathtaking music with his more conventionally attired colleagues.
Then the magic happens.
"They are just sensational. So very talented, so musical. There's nothing they can't do," says Charles Wadsworth, venerable founder of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In 1995, he brought the St. Lawrence players to the series he directs at Spoleto.
LIKE A RACE CAR
Even with the hosannas, it's hard not to notice something unusual over there in the chair on the left where Nuttall plays.
The sound that comes from the gangly yet graceful violinist and his quartet companions - violinist Barry Shiffman, cellist Marina Hoover and violist Lesley Robertson - is quite distinctive.
It has a springy tautness backed by a high level of energy. It also comes off as the very essence of spontaneity, almost as if improvised on the spot. It's not, of course. Each performance derives from many rehearsals, but the secret is making it seem in concert as if heard and played with the excitement and discovery of the first time.
"The problem is that it requires so many hours of hard, boring work to get to a certain level of ensemble and intonation for performance," Nuttall said in the few minutes before an evening performance in Columbia. "The danger is that when you work that hard to get everything just right that you wind up sacrificing a sense of freshness or spontaneity, which is a lot easier if you play the piece only a time or two. We want to give the impression that we are hearing it just as the composer composed it.
"Our goal is to have the St. Lawrence make a sound in a Mozart quartet that will be different from the sound in a Bartok. We try to have a distinctive sound but not apply the same sound to each piece we perform."
The bottom line, he thinks, is that the quartet should perform like a "finely tuned race car. When you want to drive it 30 miles an hour and show it off, you can. But when you want to kick it up to 100 in three seconds, you can do that, too."
What that sounds like, wrote Alex Ross in The New Yorker, is "cultured chaos."
And when it works just right, Nuttall and his quartet colleagues are aware of a special feeling in their audience. They can tell by the noise. Or the lack of it.
"If things are really going well, all of a sudden the coughing stops. When people are really focusing, we're on the edge of our seats, and so are they. That doesn't happen a lot, I know, but I find it a lot in opera, where they are really some maniacs. When (Placido) Domingo is singing or (Carlos) Kleiber is conducting, it's incredible. You can feel 3,500 people locked in, listening to every nuance. It's an amazing feeling."
Whether they've played before receptive or sleepy audiences, however, the post-concert reception is sure to follow.
That's a staple of the concert world where Nuttall and his fellow musicians meet their audiences, at special wine-sipping occasions designed to give donors and subscribers an opportunity to schmooze with the stars.
It's an event where Nuttall and his group can encounter some unexpected questions.
"Most people want to know the same things, like when you got started, and do you like being together. The weirdest question we get regularly is, 'Do you write your own music.'"
He breaks out laughing and adds, "I tell them, no, it was a guy named Beethoven."
A DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
By virtue of being the first violinist, Nuttall is the unofficial leader of the string quartet.
"He has a way of generating intensity in all of us," said St. Lawrence cellist Marina Hoover.
He even anticipates some queries, such as the one about how a quartet - where every voice is supposed to be equal - can possibly agree on issues such as tempos, dynamics, etc.
"It's a democratic process," Nuttall says. "I get the attention because I'm so animated. Yeah, sometimes the others will complain about all the movement, but we really have a democracy. If I show up one day for rehearsal and I'm not in a good mood, someone else takes over. You couldn't have it any other way and not screw things up badly."
Playing in the quartet during the past 12 years obviously has been hard work. The hours have been long. Travel on the road not easy. And the fees for the group - most of them less than five figures - don't come close to matching what big-name soloists such as Itzhak Perlman earn.
So why do it?
"You love the music. You believe in what you're doing. You can't imagine doing anything else," Nuttall said.
That's one reason performing at Spoleto for the past seven years has been such a pleasure, he says, and perhaps why the quartet has been so rapturously received at the festival.
"It's a good, focused energy in the Dock Street Theatre," Nuttall said. "The hall is wonderful, not too big. Intimate. Things like that do make a difference. I remember playing a Mostly Mozart concert in New York and looking out in the audience. There was a guy in the second row reading a newspaper."
He laughs and shakes his head.
"At least at Spoleto they're awake."
