Vertigo String Quartet at Curtis Institute

When Napoleon talked about a career open to the talents, he may well have had musicians in mind. If you're good, you don't wait long in line.

The whimsically named Vertigo String Quartet has already made its mark in the recital world, with a first prize in Italy's MusicAtri competition and a residency at New York's prestigious Bargemusic. The group's individual members are doing very nicely on their own as well.

Violinist Jose Maria Blumenschein is associate concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Violinist Johannes Dickbauer tours with a jazz quartet. Violist Lily Francis is a member of Lincoln Center's Chamber Music Society Two, and made her solo debut at Carnegie Hall (she also plays the violin) last May. Cellist Nicholas Canellakis, the group's engaging spokesperson, is a fellow of the Academy, the group that embraces Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School of Music, and the Weill Music Institute, and is soon to join Ms. Francis in the Chamber Music Society.

Best known for Opus

The Vertigo has been best known locally as the group that recorded the music for Michael Hollinger's Opus, the Barrymore Award-winning play about the tribulations of an aging string quartet. Such problems, presumably, lie far in the future for this group. On Sunday afternoon they returned to play in Field Hall in the Curtis alumni series.

The works they chose— the Brahms' String Quintet #2, with their former teacher, Steven Tenenbom, as second violist, and the Shostakovich Twelfth Quartet— are both autumnal works, to say the least. Both Brahms string quintets are mature pieces, with the second inaugurating the final great run of his chamber music, Opp. 111-120, that includes the Clarinet Trio and Quintet, the late piano works, and the two viola/clarinet sonatas.

The string quintets have always struck me as a little on the plush side, but they're substantial works. As occasionally happens in Brahms, the weight of the argument in Op. 111 falls mainly on the first two movements, the Allegro and the Adagio, with the last two more genial and bucolic. The work begins in unison, and just at that point the young quartet struck me as a little tentative. It soon picked up, though, and drove home the Allegro's 15-minute argument. The Adagio features one of Brahms's loveliest ideas, and the shorter, concluding Allegretto and Vivace had fine warmth and assurance.

The ailing Shostakovich

The Shostakovich two-movement Op. 133 is quite another sonic and psychological world, of course. If the middle-50ish Brahms of the Quintet seems to be enjoying the fruits of late middle age, the 62-year-old Shostakovich was already a deeply ailing man, stoked with a lifetime of the suffering (the Great Famine, the Great Purges, the Great Patriotic War) that made up the Russian experience of the mid-20th Century.

It's in this work that Shostakovich, as in the 15th of his Preludes and Fugues, flirts with a tone row, although (as, for example, in Stravinsky's Agon), the music still sounds entirely characteristic. The work finds its unity in unorthodox ways, and in a reverse of the Brahms Quintet's structure, with a seven-minute Moderato serving in the nature of an overture (see also the Fourth and Tenth quartets, and the Ninth Symphony) to a quarter-hour Allegretto, which, despite its title, runs a gamut of tempo changes as well as a brooding range of emotional ones.

Here is music that could well illustrate Beckett's birth-astride-a-grave speech in Waiting for Godot, and there was something a bit startling, if piquant, in seeing these young musicians tackle it. I don't think any group but a Russian one could take the full measure of this work, but the Vertigo's vigorous performance can already stand comparison with such classic Western interpretations as those of the Emerson and Fitzwilliams quartets.

A little surprise

The announced program was a little on the short if not the light side, but the Quartet had a surprise in the form of four brief pieces composed or arranged by two members of the group, Messrs. Dickbauer and Canellakis. The latter was represented by a two-movement work simply entitled Vertigo Quartet, which blended a traditional form, the chaconne, with modern sonorities, and a hoot of an arrangement of a traditional Balkan dance (Greek to my ear, but mountain music doesn't observe borders in that part of the world).

Dickbauer's four-movement Indie Flat, a takeoff on Terry Riley, was similarly followed by a dance arrangement, the Haxlstatter Walzer, which took a Viennese waltz through its paces, and wound up in jazz territory. As Canellakis observed, these works were meant as a lighter coda to a serious program, but they were by no means insubstantial, revealing yet more facets of this prodigiously talented group of young musicians.

There isn't much good news these days, but I'm happy to report some of it: The Vertigo String Quartet is here to stay, and if you missed them this time around, catch their next act.