Juilliard Quartet at the Perelman

The Juilliard at the Perelman:
Rich fare, thin sauce

ROBERT ZALLER

The Juilliard Quartet was once the gold standard of fiddle ensembles in America, but in its present incarnation it has lost its edge. Its veteran players still possess style and polish but no longer much verve, let alone the raw energy the Emerson Quartet (which played the Perelman a week before) can command at will.

This deficiency wasn’t a great handicap in Haydn’s E-flat Quartet, Op. 76, No. 6, which opened the concert, for in Haydn civility— in the best sense of the word— is the essence, and the Juilliard showed particularly to advantage in the Adagio, a rhapsodic fantasia that unfolded with serenity and warmth. The other two works on the program, however— the Shostakovich Thirteenth Quartet and the Beethoven First Rasumovsky— called for decidedly more than the Juilliard had to give, at least on this occasion.

The trouble with non-Russian musicians

Shostakovich often wrote with specific performers in mind, and indeed he spurred two generations of Russian musicians to greatness, just as they helped him focus and realize his vision. One need only think of Oistrakh and Rostropovich, for whom Shostakovich wrote two concertos apiece, or ensembles such as the Beethoven and Borodin Quartets. In the Thirteenth Quartet he had Vadim Borisovsky, the recently retired violist of the Beethoven, particularly in mind, and Fyodor Druzhnin, who actually played it, gave a splendid account.

Like the better-known Eighth Quartet, the Shostakovich Thirteenth is a work in one movement, but far more compact in its materials. If not quite a concerto for viola and string trio, it certainly demands heroic playing of the featured performer. The Juilliard’s violist, Samuel Rhodes, has had a distinguished career, but he simply wasn’t up to either the technical or expressive requirements of the Thirteenth, and he suffered lapses of intonation at critical points. His colleagues, too, were unable to convey the Asiatic wildness that inhabits this work—a wild sadness that sometimes seems beyond the power of any non-Russian ensemble to capture. (The Emerson substitutes vigor in its own performance of the Thirteenth, which is better than the Juilliard’s anemic approach but still off.)

Beethoven as Haydn on steroids?

The First Rasumovsky, which concluded the program, occupies the same position in Beethoven’s canon that the Eroica does among his symphonies and the Appassionata among the piano sonatas: That is, it’s a breakthrough work that opens up a new sonic and emotional world that utterly transforms its genre. The Juilliard looked backward with it rather than forward, and although a case could be made in these terms— after all, the most revolutionary works embody tradition even as they break with it—there seemed less an argument behind the performance than a simple failure to encompass the robust amplitude of the score. You can play Beethoven many ways, but projecting him as Haydn on steroids will not do. A good part of the problem lay with first violinist Joel Smirnoff, whose tone is thin and not especially attractive, and who seems to speed up, sometimes skittishly, when intensity is called for.

The players did give a more committed account of the last two movements of the Beethoven— though Smirnoff skidded over the bridge passage that links them— and the audience responded with enthusiasm. For an evening that promised great reward, however, that was too scant a satisfaction.