Young string quartet finds harmony in music and one another

Listening to a great string quartet is a paramount musical experience, akin to overhearing an impassioned conversation between four strong-willed but loving siblings. Their views are unique, but the intimacy has created a shared sensibility, the power to finish one another's sentences and complete one another's thoughts. It's easy enough to assemble the forces to perform quartet music: Throw together two violinists, a violist, and a cellist, and put the music in front of them. But it's a far different thing for those four individuals to become a quartet and attain that indefinable quality of oneness.

It is a journey that the members of the Jupiter String Quartet are taking right now, and the distance they've covered is striking. This young ensemble, whose members are enrolled in New England Conservatory's Professional String Quartet Training Program, has played together for just three years, but it has already won a host of awards, including first prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, one of the most prestigious such contests in the world.

But more remarkable than this early success is what lies at its root: Only in their 20s, the Jupiter's members, who perform at Jordan Hall tonight, have already managed to put their own stamp on their playing and begun to forge a distinct musical character. As the quartet program's director, cellist Paul Katz, puts it, "There was a time last year where I sort of decided, wow, the Jupiter has become a string quartet. It was like someone flipped the switch and they went from four really gifted people to a string quartet."

Those four gifted people decided to form the Jupiter in 2001. They all had roots in the Cleveland area: Violinists Nelson Lee, 24, and Meg Freivogel, also 24, and cellist Dan McDonough, 25, all attended the Cleveland Institute of Music. Violist Liz Freivogel (Meg's sister), 27, attended nearby Oberlin College. They'd met at music festivals, become friends, and had an intuitive sense that the musical chemistry would be right.

Moreover, they simply wanted to play together. That desire was tested early on, during a year when McDonough was in New York studying at Juilliard and the other three were in Boston, and they did whatever they had to in order to get time together.

"I think that year was the worst," says Liz during a recent conversation in Katz's studio. "We spent hours on the Chinatown bus between the two cities." "And we won't get on it ever again," Meg interjects. "We were trying to rehearse six hours a day or whatever we could stand."

The long-distance relationship prepared them early on for the famously grueling lifestyle that quartets demand. The members of most foursomes spend more time with one another than with their families. "It's a four-way marriage with all of the bad stuff and none of the good stuff," quips Katz, who spent more than 26 years as a member of the Cleveland Quartet. The reality, though, is that the passion for the music trumps all the annoyances that come along with the way of life. "We all have to make a living," he says. "We all have to have a career, but if people are in it to get rich or to get famous -- for me that isn't what's going to make it work." "We're not going to be rich?" McDonough asks with mock alarm. "Oh, did I forget to tell you that?" Katz deadpans.

The early trials also helped reinforce their respect for and trust in one another. "We make a point, if someone has a strong opinion about a piece, to try that opinion and make it sound convincing," McDonough explains.

"If you don't trust a colleague, that their musical ideas are going to be convincing, even if they're different from yours, it's going to be incredibly difficult to find a unity within the group," Lee adds.

That unity allows individuals to retain their distinctive musical personalities yet meld them into something different and greater than themselves -- that's the holy grail of quartet playing. "You find as you learn more repertoire that you have more and more common ground," says McDonough. "You're moving toward each other more than you're moving away."

Which is a good way to describe their animated playing style. Watching them rehearse excerpts from works by Dvorak and Shostakovich, it becomes clear that they interact physically as much as they do musically. They exchange glances and breaths, trying to show with their bodies the path the music should take.

"New quartets are usually extremely uptight," Katz explains, because they're learning to track the myriad details in every piece. Eventually all those aspects become part of the collective intuition rather than conscious responses. "It doesn't necessarily go through the mind. The hands react to what the ears desire."

"I think a string quartet is a strange beast," says Barry Shiffman, a violinist in the St. Lawrence String Quartet who was on the jury of the Banff competition. "It takes so many years before a group discovers its own voice. [The Jupiter] stood out in that they'd already discovered a sound unique to them.

"The most beautiful thing about chamber music is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts," he adds. "You raise each other to a higher level. And they demonstrate that particularly beautifully. They've achieved a level that's unusual, and that's only possible within a very special environment."

It's difficult to describe a quartet's sound concretely. The Jupiter's playing is light and buoyant, sparkling even in dark music. But Katz and Shiffman opt for more abstract words like "integrity," "honesty," and "sincerity." Those aspects seem to come not only from their musical interaction but from personal bonds that are as much a part of their collective personality as their playing.

"It's pretty well known that some groups that have been together for a long time don't get along well," Liz says. "I don't understand how you can play a duet that's a loving thing and play without looking at each other, not really enjoying that person."

"If there's a responsibility to each other as friends, it makes things more genuine, more authentic," Lee adds. And maybe that's what it means to become a quartet.

That and getting rich.

The Jupiter String Quartet plays music of Mozart, Dvorak, and Shostakovich tonight at 8 at Jordan Hall. Admission is free. Call 617-585-1122.