On Sept. 9 Madison audiences had a chance to enjoy the triumphant return of the Ancora String Quartet after the ensemble completed the second phase of its ambitious international venture.
Well-established on Madison’s music scene for some years now, the quartet undertook an ambitious ten-day tour of Germany in August with mezzo-soprano Melinda Paulsen, American-born professor of voice at Frankfurt University.
The second phase saw the group, together with Ms. Paulsen, performing six successive concerts (plus a radio broadcast), September 4-9, in places around Wisconsin, culminating in a final event at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison.
The program was a demanding one for both performers and audiences, bringing together music of American and German composers, with songs for mezzo and string quartet that in involve the recurrent imagery of dreams in the sung texts.
Serving as an anchor for the program was the American composer Samuel Barber. The concert opened with Dover Beach, Op. 3, his setting of a poem by Matthew Arnold for mezzo-soprano or baritone with quartet. This is mellifluous music in post-Romantic style. (An accomplished baritone, Barber performed and recorded this work himself.)
The program’s second half began with Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11, perhaps the most durable and admired of American works in this form. Its middle movement was adapted as the inescapable Adagio for Strings, but it is valuable to hear the entire work as an entity, especially as played so compellingly by the quartet.
The bilingual Paulsen, having flexed her native English with the Barber song, moved on to songs (again, with strings) of three German composers. Least known among them was Viktor Ullmann, his creativity suppressed when he was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. His three songs of 1943 (with string trio) impressed me with the genuine beauty and flow of their vocal lines.
By contrast, it was the writing for string quartet that struck me as more interesting than the vocal writing in the Melancholie cycle of four songs, Op. 13, by Paul Hindemith. The composer was a performing violist and played with a string quartet himself, so he knew that ensemble medium well. (He even wrote some prominent viola display into the fourth of these songs.)
The final work was the so-called Wessendonck Lieder by Richard Wagner. These five poems by his romantic inspiration, Mathilde Wessendonck, included two that Wagner rated as “studies” for his ensuing opera, Tristan und Isolde. They were written for voice and piano, and have become familiar in orchestral versions, but were presented here in a brand-new version for string quartet. For good measure, the first of these songs was repeated as an encore.
Paulsen is a superlative singer, with a strong, beautiful voice, and a total immersion in textual meanings. It was a joy to have her here share in this triumphant homecoming by the Ancora Quartet.