Daedalus Quartet plays at American Philosophical Society
String quartets as philosophically like-minded as the Daedalus don't come along very often.
Hosted Friday night by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the American Philosophical Society, the young ensemble played a Haydn quartet in which seams between instrumental timbres seemed to disappear. So blended is their sound that when a passage was passed from player to player, you sometimes had to watch carefully to figure out when the handover was made.
If tempos were moderate and the general temperament of the group stopped just short of red-blooded passion (even in Brahms), they could at least impress mightily in other ways.
Formed in 2000 and now in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, the Daedalus Quartet has a calling card in David Horne's Flight from the Labyrinth, a piece they commissioned that captures something about the story of Daedalus and his escape from Crete with Icarus.
Horne, 38, born in Scotland and educated at Curtis and Harvard, assembled one of those works for string quartet that throws at players every technical trick in the book. It's long on nervous, short bursts of energy, and I greatly appreciated Horne's aesthetic sensitivity in relieving chaos and dissonance with calm and resolution.
Engagement is almost impossible to resist when you find yourself clinging for dear life to passages of near-traditional harmony like so many lifeboats. Whether in the end Horne achieves a comprehensible whole is a question I'll save for another hearing.
The Brahms, String Sextet in G Major, Opus 36 (the one with the soft, mysterious opening), was slow, which zapped some of the magic of its harmonic progressions. Featuring veterans Peter Wiley (cello) and Michael Tree (viola), it was at least easy on the ears.
In Haydn's String Quartet in F Major, Opus 77, No. 2, Hob. III:82, each member bent the tempos of short, interloping figures so subtly you could only marvel at the finesse.
But it was Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet from 1914 that was the best marriage between ensemble and composer.
Touching folk tunes, and more than touching The Rite of Spring, this work is also a compendium of difficult and wide-ranging string-quartet techniques.
Some pizzicati popped like balloons, other like gentle soap bubbles. But with a haiku-like economy and density of ideas, you never had the suspicion that impressive technique was dictating the music itself.