Barry Lewis
Wes Luke (left) has settled into his role as the ensemble’s first violinist.
The Ancora String Quartet closed its season with a forward-looking work from 1834 and a backward-looking one from 1918.
The May 13 concert at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church began with the newer work, the Second String Quartet, Op. 153 In G major, from Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns.
The chamber music of Saint-Saëns is not the most familiar part of his output, but he did compose a number of large- and small-scale pieces, and at two late phases of his career he finally turned to that classic form, the string quartet.
His first venture into that form, his Op. 112, came in 1899, when he was 64. His second string quartet came 19 years later, when he was 83, only three years before his death. A lavishly talented and traditionally grounded composer, Saint-Saëns was certainly no radical in his quartet writing.The Quartet No. 2 has its elements of chromatic freedom, but in layout and in overall character it could have been composed by Mendelssohn (d. 1847) or Schumann (d. 1856), if they had lived just a little bit longer.
The work is in three movements, the first two intended to represent “youth” and “the loss of youth.” The third, with its elements of fugue, suggests maturity. It is, in all, quite listenable, and worth encountering.
In contrast to this conventional approach, Beethoven’s Quartet No. 12 in E-flat, Op. 127, from 1834, is a bold and highly personal projection of a stylistic world to come. The work not only launched his late quartets, but became a symbol of the new radicalism of his entire late period. Beethoven was totally deaf by 1824, its date of completion, and this quartet finds him in a creative world all his own — far from the world of Haydn, where he started. There is a daring and a striving in this music not equaled until (perhaps) Arnold Schoenberg’s quartets (1905-1936).
The Ancorans are fully up to the demands of the Saint-Saëns score, for all its quirks. More important, they are fully comfortable in the lofty, challenging idiom of late Beethoven. Perhaps they will undertake a full Beethoven some day.
Finally, this program showed how well the new first violinist Wes Luke has settled into his role in the ensemble. His dashing and precise playing of virtuosic passages is right on target, and he does an excellent job of communicating this élan to his colleagues.