Review: Penderecki String Quartet & Stéphan Sylvestre
Usually most of the seats are occupied, but Wednesday night, The Music Room was packed nearly to the rafters. The Penderecki String Quartet, was giving a concert with young Canadian pianist Stéphan Sylvestre, a piano professor at the University of Western Ontario. Intimacy is one of the Music Room’s best features and the communal aspect of attending a concert there is unique. That being said, trying to find room for 85 people in less than 300 square feet took the experience over the border to an uncomfortable game of sardines in fairly short order.
With overflow audience members seated immediately behind the performers as if they were on a bus, concentration couldn’t have been easy, particularly for violist Christine Vlajk who was overlooked on three sides. The PSQ’s ambitious program was challenging enough without the added burden of worrying they might put out someone’s eye in an especially furious bout of bowing.
Some quartets have permanent first and second violin spots and others rotate. The PSQ is of the latter breed and it was Jeremy Bell occupying the first chair for Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No.1. At nearly 30 minutes long, it is quite substantial for a concert opener and, being Tchaikovsky, quite intense. He scored five, sometimes even six voices, for large parts of the piece, which gives the it a very dense, almost symphonic, texture. Despite some uncharacteristic intonation slips, the piece was very well played overall. The famous second movement, which has been rescored successfully for cello and piano, was particularly lovely.
Canadian composer Alexina Louie’s (b. 1949) sparse and ethereal Dénouement was the perfect complement to the Tchaikovsky. The PSQ is right at home with 20th and 21st century repertoire and gave a brilliant performance. Although there are less notes per page that the Tchaikovsky, this piece still has its share of technical challenges. The ascetic beauty of the harmonic sections was especially engaging.
Brahms’ Piano Quartet in F major Op 34 is one of the gems of the chamber music repertoire. Originally conceived as a string quartet, the piece was published as a piano duo before being repackaged into piano quintet after the duo didn’t sell very well.
This piece and the Brahms string quartets form part of the PSQ’s core Romantic repertoire. They have played it many times and their familiarity with the score was immediately apparent. Like the Tchaikovsky, the piece is quite dense but Brahms was better at writing idiomatically for a variety of instruments, so it never sounds like hard work. From the first notes, it felt like after the journey of the first half, we were had arrived back home.
Pianist Stéphan Sylvestre showed brilliant control throughout, proving that playing at full stick in a small room needn’t be a problem. There wasn’t a moment of muddiness and the balance was always right on the money even at full volume. In his solo section in the second movement he captured beautifully the essence of Brahms’ restrained but deeply felt emotion.
I was a student at Laurier from 1999-2003 during which time I saw the PSQ play many, many concerts at the university and elsewhere. Despite their command of a vast amount of repertoire, there was always something a little bit special about Brahms and even now, watching the PSQ play this piece is truly a delight. It is this sort of playing that makes chamber music some of the best there is.
