Harlem Quartet
By Marcus Overton
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Benjamin Franklin once said that wine is the proof that God
loves us and wants us to be happy. He would surely have added music to
that list if he had been at the Harlem Quartet concert on Friday evening
in UC San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall in a program presented by
ArtPower.
Capping a week-long residency of UCSD
masterclasses and interactive programs for students in Chula Vista and
other area schools, this one-of-a-kind quartet was ready to swing.
Wait. One of a kind? Yes, I’m willing to make that bet. Here’s why.
The
Harlem Quartet — violinists Ilmar Gavilán and Melissa White, violist
Jaime Amador and cellist Felix Umansky — was born out of the Sphinx
Organization, a Detroit-based arts education initiative with a mission
to harness the power of the arts to lift kids out of underserved
communities through music.
The foursome’s approach reflects Duke Ellington’s
declaration that there are two kinds of music: good and bad. The Harlem
Quartet takes the whole universe of music as their domain.
So
Friday night’s concert covered a lot of territory: quartets by Mozart
and Beethoven, some lushly textured bossa nova, a rhythmically
challenging Afro-Cuban piece, and that small Anton Webern masterpiece,
“Langsamer Satz” (Slow Movement) that out-Mahlers Mahler.
Mozart’s
B-flat Major String Quartet, K.458, was one of six he gave in
appreciation to his sometime teacher Joseph Haydn. Mozart did not give
it the nickname it carries, “The Hunt”, but its expansive opening
summons us to the outdoors, and the entire work is shot through with
sunshine. The Quartet played it with a pillowy amplitude that never
sacrificed clarity to its big richly burnished sound. Throughout its
four movements — in fact, throughout the entire concert — the Quartet
exhibited an uncanny ability to select perfect tempos that allowed the
music to breathe while propelling it forward.
Antonio
Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema” (arranged by the Quartet and Dave Glenn)
passed a tune we all think we know through the prism of four individual
musical minds, emerging as a textured rainbow on the other side. What
might have appeared to be a musical bon-bon snapped into place later
when Webern’s “Langsamer Satz” suddenly seemed to be predicting a
musical future in which Ipanema was not as far away from Vienna as you
might think.
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