Tokyo Quartet's farewell at the Perelman

Great orchestras can hope to continue indefinitely; personnel turnovers don't endanger their continuity. Not so with string quartets: Their sound and personality is determined by the interaction of four musicians. Replacements may keep the brand name going, but at a certain point the resulting transformation is such that it's best to pack things in.

The Tokyo String Quartet, founded at Juilliard in 1969 and based at Yale since 1976, has reached such a point with the impending retirement of its last original member, violist Kazuhide Isamura. It's been a long run as quartets go, and certainly a distinguished one.

This week's recital at the Perelman Theater was the Tokyo group's penultimate appearance in Philadelphia, where it has long been a welcome visitor. It added a fine memory to many others. The program, consisting of Mozart's Quartet #20 in D (K. 499), the Bartok Fourth, and the Brahms Second String Sextet, showed the Tokyo fully at home in Classical, Romantic and modern repertory.

Mozart takes a holiday

The Mozart is something of an outlier, spaced as it is between two quartet clusters, 17-19 (K. 458-465) and 21-23 (K. 575-590), the latter of which were Mozart's final essays in the form. The piece doesn't seem to have arisen from any commission, so it may have been a sportive exercise, perhaps to please Mozart's friend and publisher, Franz Anton Hoffmeister.

The principal theme of the opening Allegretto is ingratiating enough, but without a particularly distinctive profile. Mozart takes it through such an ingenious development, however, that it yields a trove of riches, as if to demonstrate that theme and not melody is the proper basis of sonata form. At least Professor Mozart might have had that thought in mind if he were a theorist of the sonata instead of being merely a superb practitioner.

Many other pleasures can be found in the ensuing movements, the last two of which feature themes that unfurl from a single long bow-stroke. K. 499 is Mozart in a musicianly mode, playing with counterpoint and polyphony in a sidelong homage to his own master, Haydn. The Tokyo played with both relish and restraint, picking out the subtleties of the score without pressing it beyond its own ambitions.

Culture shock

But what would Mozart have made of the Bartok Fourth Quartet, which immediately followed him on the program? The dissonances of this aggressively Modernist score would have startled him, but once he'd gotten past the culture shock— say, five minutes or so— I think he'd have found a kindred spirit in the clean lines and rigorous argument of the Hungarian master.

Probably he'd have been grateful, too, for first violinist Martin Beaver's popped string, which interrupted the proceedings a few measures into the opening Allegro, giving listeners a chance to adjust to the differences between 1786 and 1928.

Bartok's six quartets come in three distinct groupings: The first are still under the influence of Impressionism and post-Romanticism, the middle two astringent and spiky, and the last two (as with much music of the 1930s) are cast in a more lyrical idiom. These works were once considered the legitimate successors of the Beethoven set, but now they share pride of place with the Shostakovich cycle.

The heart of the palindromic Fourth Quartet is its central slow movement, where the busyness and sometimes brusqueness of the outer movements gives way to the nocturnal quality with which Bartok typically invests his slower movements and is one of his most distinctive qualities— indeed, Bartok is, among modern composers, our poet of the night.

Middle-aged at birth?

The Tokyo shifted gears smoothly, giving as authoritative a performance here as it had for Mozart, and then did so once again after the break, with the Brahms Sextet in G.

Brahms was born in high spring, but his music— even his sunnier works, such as the Second Sextet— bears the mark of autumn. It's not so much that a vein of melancholy runs through his work— true enough, as far as it goes— as that his musical thought is naturally intricate and dense and, well, mature: Brahms seems to have been aged 40 from birth.

Heavenly length

Many observers have remarked that Beethoven's legacy was a burden to Brahms, but he really carries the high 19th Century on his back in all its cultural complexity— far more so, I think, than Wagner, with his taste for the fogs of German mythology.

Brahms's normally dark-hued coloration is enhanced in the Sextet by the additional of a second viola and cello (Michael Tree and Peter Wiley, respectively), although the musical substance has more geniality than the fervidly Romantic First Sextet. It's also the longest of his chamber works, and, like most of them, symphonic in scope. But no one seemed to want it to end; it's one of those works of heavenly length that, as Schumann said of Schubert, one happily goes on listening to as long as it wants to speak.

Tree and Wiley, themselves veteran chamber musicians, blended in seamlessly with the ensemble.

If the Tokyo Quartet gave us a full sample of the scope of its repertory in this recital, it gave us something else as well: a sense of the continuity of the Western Classical tradition, and how a deep and protracted immersion in it reveals the fundamental unity that underlies its diversity of styles. To this splendid ensemble, hail and farewell.