MUSIC REVIEW : Quartet Rendition of Webern Proves a Serious Affair

SummerFest ’91 trotted out its new kids on the block Sunday evening with the local debut of the Ridge String Quartet. Opening the concert with a pair of works by Anton Webern, the thirtysomething, New York-based ensemble lost no time establishing its serious intentions.

The Ridge players wisely disarmed the audience’s potential resistance to Webern’s sparse, seemingly cerebral Six Bagatelles, Op. 9, by beginning with the composer’s little known “Slow Movement,” a single quartet movement crafted in 1905 as a student exercise for Webern’s compositional mentor, Arnold Schonberg. This pristine sample of Webern’s native musical instinct explodes with Romantic lyricism and emotional catharses that come as rapidly as fireworks at a pops concert. Its effulgent style, which could be described as Brahms on steroids, should be studied as the key to understanding the inner language of Webern’s later, more austere instrumental works.

“Slow Movement” proved an apt calling card for the Ridge Quartet, which was as intense and emotionally volatile as this nascent Webern opus. The ensemble, violinists Krista Feeney and Robert Rinehart, violist Maria Kannen and cellist Peter Wyrick, reached its frenzied climaxes with dangerous abandon, yet found sufficient warmth for its reflective eddies.

In Six Bagatelles, the Ridge Quartet prevented the composer’s fragile idiom from disintegrating into sonic shards by stressing the linear connection of its discrete, aphoristic motives. The players displayed a perceptive appreciation of the Bagatelles’ complex architecture.

The Ridge players’ hyperactive account of Beethoven’s F Minor String Quartet, Op. 95, seemed too one-sided--it lacked gravity beneath the brio--to do justice to the work’s complexities. The ensemble’s sonority, brilliant and top-heavy, became splayed and wiry at extreme sonic and emotional levels. When the playing of the Ridge Quartet mellows, it promises to be a heady vintage.

Spelling the quartet between the Webern and the Beethoven, cellist Ralph Kirshbaum offered a masterful interpretation of J. S. Bach’s E-flat Major Suite for unaccompanied cello. His finely chiseled, immaculate lines poured forth with uncanny ease, every note properly weighted and every ornament subtly fashioned. Each movement of the dance suite displayed its unique character, and the Sarabande, with its double stops, glowed with a rich, organ-like sonority.

Kirschbaum may have sacrificed a bit of poetry on his decidedly Apollonian altar, but the purity of his vision will long be remembered.