Author: ERIC E. HARRISON
“Varied” was the word members of the Quapaw Quartet used to describe the program for Tuesday night’s Arkansas Symphony River Rhapsodies chamber concert at Little Rock’s Clinton Presidential Center. And that’s probably the kindest, most accurate description of it.
Although the quartet’s annual showcase consisted of only about 25 percent music by Ludwig van Beethoven, the orchestra titled it “Ode to Beethoven,” apparently a semisuccessful way of hiding that the first thing on the program was 30 minutes of String Quartet by Witold Lutaslawski.
The Polish composer specifies that his 1964 piece, his only work in the genre, has no meter, no key, no pulse and no cohesion – the four parts are written and published independently of one another, and with the exception of a very few passages, the players are not supposed to be playing together (in token of which, violinist Eric Hayward, sitting first chair, started before his quartet-mates had even sat down).
Much of the piece that sounded like anything at all alternated between a burning beehive and the torture of cats; the composer seems to have been bent on seeing how many things he could do with four stringed instruments that wouldn’t involve actually making music with them.
The minimalist Chalk, a 1992 piece by Michael Torke, the orchestra’s first Composer of the Year, at least involved some actual melody and harmony, though it’s unlikely something anybody in the audience would be able to walk out whistling.
Thank goodness the quartet – Hayward and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violins; Ryan Mooney, viola; and David Gerstein, cello – finished up with a stirring, sometimes brilliant, performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in f minor, “Serioso.”
And Alisa Coffey, the orchestra’s principal harpist, had a fine turn in the charming, characteristically French, tonal-for-20th-century harp showpiece Rhapsodie pour La Harpe by Michel Grandjany.