Pro Musicis Presents the Solera Quartet in Review
Solera String Quartet: Tricia Park, violin; Miki-Sophia Cloud, violin;
Molly Carr viola; Andrew Janss, cello;
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
October 23, 2018
This past Tuesday night, Weill Recital Hall was the scene of a highly promising and successful debut for the Solera Quartet, in a program that included Mozart’s String Quartet in D minor, K. 173, Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, and a quartet entitled Entr’acte (composed in 2011) by Caroline Shaw (b. 1982).
Winner of the 2017 Pro Musicis International Award (and the same organization’s 2018 Father Eugéne Merlet Award for Community Service), the New York City-based Solera Quartet, founded in 2015, is made up of four musicians with outstanding credentials quite apart from their work with Solera. Violinists Tricia Park and Miki-Sophia Cloud, violist Molly Carr, and cellist Andrew Janss have individual biographies which cite an Avery Fisher Career Grant, a Grammy nomination, a top prize in the Primrose International Viola Competition, and collaborations with renowned musicians in the world’s most prominent venues. The individual strengths of these four technically polished and musically vibrant performers were abundantly clear in Tuesday’s recital, but more important to see was that they work well as a very tightly knit ensemble, an achievement not always guaranteed by individual success.
Beyond their playing, Solera is a string quartet with noble missions. One of its stated missions is a charitable one, as they perform for incarcerated communities through their Prison Residency Project (recognized with a Guarneri String Quartet Residency, funded by the Chamber Music America Residency Partnership Program) – a commendable enterprise. Another of the quartet’s missions is to bridge old and new in music, based (as its biography states) “on a deep respect for the rich string quartet tradition alongside an intrepid desire to add new layers to that tradition through its fresh interpretations and innovative approach to the concert experience.” This mixture of old and new is expressed by the very name Solera, originally a Spanish word for the process of making wines and spirits by layering old and new vintages in one barrel.
While their name is ingenious (and arguably more mellifluous than the Japanese equivalent, shitsugi!), and their credentials are certainly impressive, one tries not to be swayed by anything but music. After all, artists are promoted these days as all things to all people – avant garde yet traditional, youthful yet mature, and so on – so which sort of spirit would this Solera barrel truly yield?
Their Mozart, K. 173, which opened, was played with a good mix of youthful vigor and mature probing for a work reflecting Mozart’s deepening involvement (at age seventeen) with this instrumentation. To continue the wine image, one could compare it to the first Beaujolais nouveau of the autumn, fresh, dark, and delicious! With the extroverted expressiveness of Ms. Park and Ms. Cloud, the golden sound of Mr. Janss, and the warm lines and support of Ms. Carr, the ensemble’s vibrancy commanded the audience’s attention from start to finish.
The Solera’s approach is highly physically demonstrative, to the point where one felt the upper strings might go airborne at any moment – a tendency which this reviewer hoped would not affect the hallowed Beethoven to come – but it worked to bring the Mozart a choreographic expressiveness. It can be thrilling for an audience to see the solo lines and phrases heightened visually, and undoubtedly some of this movement can enhance the group’s unity at times. In any case it was clear that all four musicians were truly present in every moment. Appropriately, Every Moment Present is the title of the Solera Quartet’s newly released CD, which this listener looks forward to hearing.
Particular highlights in the Mozart were the Menuetto with its central Trio full of playful phrasing and nuance, and the fugal last movement, a tour de force with its chromatic opening entrance delivered boldly by Mr. Janss and expertly knit together in the subsequent counterpoint. The first movement was the only movement that felt a bit uneasy to this listener, as if the violins were possibly trying to minimize the doggedness of its relentless repeated-note motif (one which one might call Beethovenian, had Beethoven not been only age three at the time of its composition in 1773).
The highlight of the program for this listener followed, Entr’acte by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. Inspired by Haydn’s quartet op. 77, No. 2 and “its spare and soulful shift to an unexpected key for the central trio in the minuet,” Entr’acte takes things, as the composer’s notes state, “to the other side of Alice’s looking glass in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.” It is an emotionally powerful work, reflecting clear connections to traditional string quartet music, but with inspired twists, dissonances, and extended techniques to convey (as this reviewer interpreted it) a musical tale of disintegration, struggle, and final loss.
The Solera Quartet played Entr’acte with complete commitment and intense involvement. As its tonal opening harmonies became increasingly disjunct, the musicians skillfully projected that dissolution, descending into what is marked on the score as “pitchless bow noise” – not an easy thing to pull off dramatically, and resulting inevitably in a laugh or two from a few unprepared audience members. The quartet handled the structure expertly, rebuilding energy in the central pizzicato section for a hint of musical stability before all devolved again into lone cello strumming by Mr. Janss, as if “recalling fragments of an old tune or story” (as the score states). The overall effect was devastating, at least as this musician received it.
There is certainly a theatrical element to the work, which the Solera ensemble handled sensitively, but it was never theatrical in a gimmicky way. Put to the test by a few re-hearings on Youtube (by the Solera, of course), Entr’acte emerged with equal power each time. Its music spoke of heartbreak and had this listener in tears.
Though one is at a loss to think of a corresponding wine for the above work, it was certainly a deep blend of old and very new. The second half, on the other hand, would be filled by the music of not only an older era, but an older composer facing illness and death. Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor Op. 132, one of this listener’s all-time favorite quartets, has as its central movement a monumental masterpiece known as the Heiliger Dankgesang (“Holy Song of Thanks”). Though the admonition not to pour new wine into old wineskins is quite familiar, perhaps the Solera would be the young vessel for this very old and very great wine. One had high hopes.
The first two movements were so well wrought that this listener scribbled in the program, “the maturity and unity of conception that mark the great string quartets.” In fact, all four of the outer movements were hard to fault, with just an occasional intonation issue early on, resulting in some retuning between movements.
The only movement that seemed to want a bit more ripening was the glorious central movement, one of this listener’s favorite movements in the literature. Just as the Shaw piece recalls “fragments of an old tune or story,” it seems that Beethoven’s gratitude here is for gifts imagined and remembered from a rather distant convalescent state. Despite Beethoven’s outpourings of gratitude in this music, this listener finds that with too much energy or commotion in the local detail, the flourishes and trills, one can lose the overarching sense of the gravitas from which Beethoven’s blessed relief emerged. It is perhaps not a coincidence that this reviewer has tended to favor performances of this by older musicians, including one by the Alban Berg Quartet. Such perspective may be a tall order for a quartet full of youth, energy, and promise, but there is plenty of time for this wine to age.
Overall, it was a beautiful and memorable evening. Cheers to the Solera!
