Thursday evening’s Friends of Chamber Music concert was originally supposed to feature the wonderful St. Lawrence String Quartet, but the group had to cancel its appearance several months ago.
Attendees were anything but shortchanged with the substitution of the 6-year-old Escher String Quartet. It is quickly making a name for itself in the field, and this superlative concert explained why.
Put simply, this group has all the qualities necessary to be the next Emerson or Juilliard Quartet: total focus, unflagging energy, bottomless technique and, perhaps most important, rare musical insight and a profound level of cohesion.
Like many other young quartets these days, the Escher is not trying to build a reputation by just playing Haydn or Brahms. Instead, the group is exploring new music and unfairly neglected composers such as Alexander Zemlinsky. A leading musical voice of the first half of the 20th century, he was one of dozens whose careers were derailed by the Nazis. After fleeing Vienna in 1938 and settling in the U.S., he died in 1942 largely forgotten.
The Escher is in the process of recording all four of Zemlinsky’s quartets on the Naxos label. For this program, it performed the composer’s String Quartet No. 4, Op. 25 (1936).
This melancholic, at times even doleful, work with its burnished harmonies, immediately plunges the listener into the painful era in which it was written. Though marked by the avant garde, it might best be described as post-romantic, remaining solidly tonal.
The evening opened with a taut take on Pierre Jalbert’s String Quartet No. 4 (2008), written for the group. This technically challenging piece comprises four forlornly evocative, geometrically inspired soundscapes.
The Escher topped off its program with a pleasingly convivial, ebullient version of Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 44, No. 1.
As an encore, the ensemble offered a forceful reading of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet that only whetted the appetite for more.
