Old and new make for a perfect match
 The Brentano quartet (from left): Serena Canin, Misha Amory, Nina Marie Lee, and Mark Steinberg. (David Rowe Artists) |
ROCKPORT - It's a classical-music programming cliche to match the avant-garde with old masters, like a grade-school buddy system guarding against audience members wandering off. But Friday's Rockport Chamber Music Festival concert by the Brentano String Quartet and pianist Peter Serkin made it a virtue - their first-half pairing of the familiar Joseph Haydn and the formidable Charles Wuorinen turned the composers into audacious, adventurous cousins.
The Haydn - the D-minor "Quinten" Quartet, op. 76, no. 2, named for the falling fifths of the opening theme - displayed taut energy, the group taking its cue from first violinist Mark Steinberg's lean tone. It's a somewhat cool result, but the sharp dynamic contrasts and rhythmic point suited Haydn's prodigious, late-career invention.
Wuorinen's Second Piano Quintet, given its world premiere, was a Festival commission; Serkin joined the Brentano for a bracing ride. Wuorinen is a modernist zealot, but it's an ebullient, hedonistic zeal, his fluid atonality coursing with a sparkling, Haydnesque delight in musical possibilities.
A flurry of tangled counterpoint, led by Steinberg and second violinist Serena Canin, blows open the piece; the piano's flourishes and jabs eventually herd the group into a brief unison fanfare. Misha Amory's soulful, questioning viola threaded through the slow second movement's austerity; Nina Marie Lee's cello keyed the third movement's roller-coaster scherzo, the action ricocheting about the ensemble.
The elegiac fourth movement is built around the piano, collecting rhapsodic fragments into resonant clouds casting shadows over allusions to the previous movements. Much of the pleasure of this long section was in the composer playing to Serkin's unique strengths: the transparency of voicing, the infinite gradations of touch, the combination of sharp precision and seemingly impossible delicacy - bright stars on a cold night - which he does better than anybody else. The movement does run on a little too long, but Wuorinen has a surprise left; the scherzo comes barreling back in with a blizzard of biting syncopation, hinting at a fractured, avant-garde version of a big-band shout chorus, brilliantly closing a work which frames its drama in steel and glass.
The second half was given over to Beethoven, his op. 127 Quartet in E-flat Major. The wiry sound that served Haydn well was a liability here - the massive chords of the first movement had the appropriate seam-bursting grandeur, and Amory and Lee had some exquisite interplay in the Scherzando, but elsewhere, loud meant aggressively extroverted and soft meant pallidly introverted. Beethoven came off as less voluble than just bipolar.
