PCMS presents the Johannes Quartet

Every good ensemble has its own style, just as every good orchestra does. That of the Johannes Quartet is particularly distinctive. Entrances are finely judged; balances are fleetly poised but full of tension and vitality. Violinists Soovin Kim and Jessica Lee are young performers, violist C.J. Chang and cellist Peter Stumpf are more mature, but the group gives the impression of having lived a lifetime together while still bringing freshness to whatever they undertake. There is absolutely nothing generic about anything the Johannes plays; everything, even in the most familiar repertory, seems to have been thought through carefully, phrase by phrase.

It’s said of the great soloists that they never give the same performance twice, but this is equally true of ensembles. So, as carefully constructed and confidently projected as their K. 421 Mozart and their Second Razumovsky Beethoven were, the Johannes still left room for the improvisatory touch, the auditory surprise, the moment when sparks can fly.

A whimsical bit of arcana

The opening piece on the program was a novelty, the Homunculus for String Quartet (2007) by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Finnish-born Salonen is best known as a conductor, including a 17-year tenure at the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but he has also pursued an active career as a composer. The work the Johannes played — a compact, 12-minute excursion ranging over a number of moods and effects — was commissioned by the quartet itself. The title is a whimsical bit of arcana, deriving from alchemical theories, attributed to 16th-century necromancer Paracelsus, about human sperm or eggs containing tiny, fully-formed figures.

Knowing this suggests Salonen is a bit of a prankster — Hindemith had a not dissimilar interest in the esoterica of Johannes Kepler — but it tells us nothing about the music, which plays out as a kind of rhapsody, with scurrying passages abruptly turned by cadences and brief solo passages, and stretches sounding a little like Debussy lost in a funhouse. The work did show off the range of the quartet, as the dronelike passages of its opening pages require a heavy bowing that was in marked contrast to the lightness of touch it brought to the rest of the program.

Not quite "tragic"

The Salonen piece displayed the quartet’s virtuosic capacities to good effect, but the more substantial test of the group was in Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart’s K. 421 is one of the minor-key works — the Piano Concertos K. 466 and 491 are two other examples, as well as the Masonic Funeral Music, K. 477 — that shows a new emotional complexity and expressiveness in him. If “tragic” is too weighty and perhaps too Romantic a word to apply to them, they show a deepened personality.

It’s a parlor game to pick and choose among so many Mozart masterpieces of whatever signature, or to proclaim any as deeper than another, for what is deeper than perfection? But K. 421 sends a certain chill up the spine in ways that its predecessors do not, and it is a perturbation that lingers. The Johannes got at this by playing subtle riffs on the music, with stabbing interjections and widened aural spaces, but all brought off with refinement and without sacrificing the grace and elegance that informs every note the mature Mozart ever wrote. This was familiar music played with probing accents and dynamically shading, both revelatory and fully convincing at the same time.

Resist the Romantic

If you want to make the case that the set of Beethoven’s three Razumovsky Quartets are, collectively, the greatest group of works ever gathered under a single opus number in musical history, you won’t get an argument from me. The F Major, op. 59, No. 1, is from its opening bars a work of such penetration and power that it simply revolutionized the quartet literature in ways that only Beethoven himself could ever approach. The E Minor Op. 59, No. 2, though, is a work that, for all its vigor and propulsion, exhibits, particularly in its great adagio, the ineffable inwardness that one meets again only in the last quartets some two decades later.

Performers must resist the temptation to give the music too Romantic an impress, for although it carries the human spirit to places it had never been before, it demands a new restraint as well. The Johannes was splendidly alert to this, realizing the music’s profundity with a beautifully nuanced portamento. Beethoven gives the most extraordinary individual character to each instrument in this music, yet demands of them a transcendent harmony as a whole. Sublimity, when it comes in music, has to seem the most natural thing in the world, as effortless as it appears inevitable. What was really behind this performance, though, was the perfect attunement of four individual talents and temperaments to one another. That does not come easily.

This was one evening I plan to savor for a long time.