The reporter on Wall Street
A funny thing happened on the way to the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library March 27. The girl reporter was ambling down Wall Street around 7 p.m. and passed by Whisknladle (formerly Fresh). There she spied four diners: La Jolla Music Society president and artistic director Christopher Beach, former staff member Marcus Overton, and choreographer/dancer Wesley Fata. Beach introduced Donald E. Osborne of San Francisco-based California Artists Management. Osborne is the agent for the Warsaw-based Szymanowski Quartet, the Athenaeum’s artists of the evening on the Barbara and William Karatz Chamber Concert Series. The concert was everyone’s destination it seems.
A small world is Wall Street, and the electrifying quartet ” comprising violinists Andrej Bielow and Grzegorz Kotow, violist Vladimir Mykitka and cellist Marcin Sieniawski ” opened up the larger world of chamber music to a near-capacity audience gathered in the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Music Room. It is, as my seatmate noted, a perfect place in which to hear this kind of music.
Most impressive is the attentiveness of the music-smart audience, who withheld their applause as long as telegraphed at the end of Dmitry Shostakovich’s unrelentingly mournful Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110. The work commences with a downright eerie Largo, proceeds through an electric, frenetic, demented waltz, a delicate cello solo in alte, and finishes with two Largo movements that rip one’s heart out. Szymanowski, formed in 1995, played superbly, with passion and endearing subtlety.
The work was a sharp contrast to Franz Joseph Haydn’s playful and uplifting String Quartet No. 1 in G Major, Op. 77, which began the evening and gave promise of extraordinary aural treats to come.
After the interval, the Szymanowski played Karol Szymanowski’s passionate and bumptious Nocturne and Tarantella, which (according to the excellent program note by Stanley Walens) is a string quartet orchestration by conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, made especially for the Symanowski Quartet. They then delivered an exquisite and playful reading of Ludwig von Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 18, evidence of the true meaning of chamber music “playing” or any playing of a classical nature, for that matter. It made one grateful to be alive and to be present.
The concert was so warmly received that the boys from Warsaw treated those assembled to a short work by Ukrainian composer Miroslav Skoryk, written around 1980, which showed off each player. At the reception following the concert, cellist Marcin raved about La Jolla and expressed his wish to return. Apparently, there is some chance of that.
Featuring renowned pianist Ursula Oppens, the next concert on the Karatz Chamber Concert Series takes place at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 6, at the Athenaeum, 1008 Wall St. For tickets and information, visit www.ljathenaeum.org or call (858) 454-5872.