Rick Langer
Pro Arte players, from left, Parry Karp, Suzanne Beia, Sally Chisholm and David Perry.
The Pro Arte Quartet’s concert on March 28 in Mills Hall, was, in effect, a sampling of three stylistic periods: classical, romantic and modern.
The most fascinating component of the program was played second, a work by the modern composer Moisey (or Mieczyslaw) Weinberg (or Vaynberg, or Vainberg), a Polish Jew whose family perished in the Holocaust.
Weinberg, who is not a well-known composer today, was born in 1919. At the beginning of World War II, he moved from Warsaw to the Soviet Union, becoming the protégé and friend of Dmitri Shostakovich. He was a productive composer and stubborn individual to his death in 1996. His considerable output included 17 string quartets. The Pro Arte Quartet played No. 5, Op. 27.
Composed in 1945, a year after the war, it reflects the lingering angst and sorrow of that period. Weinberg’s music is inevitably going to be compared to — and judged against — that of his mentor, Shostakovich. And the score’s five movements are full of brooding, furious energy. Nevertheless, they show a more restrained and even humane character when compared to Shostakovich’s grimness and slashing sarcasm. It is “modern” music not in any iconoclastic sense, but rather as serious creative thought of its time. We should hear more of these quite absorbing quartets by Weinberg.
In playing this work, the Pro Arte Quartet was simply magnificent. It responded to Weinberg’s changes of mood, alert to the expert exploitation of individual instruments as well as the ensemble. It was particularly adroit in heeding the composer’s frequent use of muting the strings. I am not sure how much these players have begun to delve into Weinberg’s music, but I hope they will develop a considerable exploration of it hereafter.
The romantic spirit was embodied in an unusual set of miniatures by Antonin Dvorak, called the “Cypresses.” These are the composer’s 1887 adaptations for string quartet of 12 of the 19 songs in his youthful (1865) cycle of love lyrics. The group played six of those adaptations, alert to harmonic subtleties, but never losing sight of their original melodic essence.
The concert ended with a classical piece, Mozart’s Quartet No. 17 in B-flat, K.458, known as the “Hunt.” This music is both elegant and robust, and the quartet handsomely spun out its delights in full.
