Lydian’s act is tunefully together
Published: April 26, 2009, 12:30 am
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The Lydian String Quartet has been together since 1980, and it shows.
As a few fans marveled afterward, the musicians do not even have to look at each other. Maybe they don’t want to look at each other, after all this time. But they communicate anyway.
You can learn a lot from the Lydian! So perfectly in sync are these musicians that sometimes, especially in very soft passages, they do not even sound like a quartet. They sound like a voice, or a rustle, or a sigh. They can bend the timing together, craft crescendos and decrescendos of breathtaking subtlety and turn out nifty dramatic endings. God knows how they do it, sitting there somberly, their eyes almost never meeting. Perhaps they have learned to tune in to each other’s breathing.
Their skills were showcased to fine effect in the three quartets that traditionally end every year’s Slee series: the Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18, No. 4; the Quartet in F, Op. 135; and the Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2.
No one player dominates this group, and that might be another key to its balance. The melody lines are on the thin side. In the opening quartet, violinist Daniel Stepner allowed himself a touch of romantic drama here and there, but in general the individual bows to the group.
The Scherzo of the C minor quartet was especially witty and entertaining, because of the superb timing.
In the F major quartet, the famous slow movement was the highlight. The Lydian did not do anything special with it, but it was touching how they tuned up specially beforehand, treating the piece as if it were a sacrament.
It had a hushed beauty.
The evening as a whole peaked with the concluding “Razumovsky” Quartet. Everything the Lydian did well came through here. The Russian melody in the Scherzo shone as the musicians bounced it around one to another. They have a great sense of rhythm that makes a piece like this tremendously exciting.
Cellist Joshua Gordon, in the slow movement, showed off his rich, lyrical tone. And the last movement, quirky and Gypsyish, was top-notch Beethoven. The Lydian dug into it with rustic enthusiasm.
Comedy is hard to do well, and the humorous aspects of the Op. 59 quartet brought out a different side of the Lydian than we saw in November, when the quartet played the thorny Op. 131. For the record, filling out the group Friday were violist Mary Ruth Ray and violinist Judith Eissenberg, who missed their last concert here because of an injury.
Concert Review
Lydian String Quartet
Friday night in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall on the University at Buffalo North Campus, Amherst.
mkunz@buffnews.com
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