Truly Seen and Heard

The string quartet concert, as a species, is deliberately dull to watch. In this purest and most hidebound of performance genres, the audience is supposed to set its ears on full alert and give its eyes a rest. Listeners stare at the walls, at four stationary entertainers dressed in black, and at row upon row of napes. That’s the way it has always been.

There are reasons for this scenic blandness. The classical music establishment quails at the thought that lights and action, once allowed into the temple grounds, will usurp the power of music. Give people something exciting to watch, the thinking goes, and they will soon stop listening altogether. A few ensembles have done battle with these conventions. The Kronos Quartet began using costumes and theatrical lighting decades ago. Now the Emerson Quartet, one of the most visible string quartets in America, has begun confronting the idea that a concert is inherently a theatrical experience.

“The Noise of Time,” an 80-minute theater piece by British director Simon McBurney, acts as an atmospheric frame for the Emerson Quartet’s performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s brief, tormented String Quartet No. 15. McBurney’s dramatic meditation, which is getting the first of five performances at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse on Wednesday, springs from the belief that in a visually saturated culture, people crave something to look at. Where the eye wanders, the mind is sure to follow.

McBurney, who founded the London company Theatre de Complicite (recently shortened to Complicite), selects his words so deliberately that his thought process can almost be heard down the line from London. An unadorned concert hall, he explains, evokes “the idea of a neutral space in which you listen to the music. But of course it’s not neutral, it’s full of associations. And people can go to these concerts and feel as if they’re missing something, as if you can’t hear what is being played, almost as if you can’t attune your ears. I realized there was the possibility of creating a different kind of context, so that the ears and the mind are tuned up in a different way, and audiences can listen to the heart of this very intimate piece.”

And so, at the opening of the evening he designed, the musicians do not shuffle onstage, drop into their chairs, adjust the stands, fuss with the music and begin to tune, as they do in almost every chamber concert. Instead, an illuminated antique radio squawks and buzzes on a black stage. Four silent actors dressed in the bad, mouse-colored suits of Soviet times--Shostakovich’s times--prowl the stage in slow motion while a chattering soundtrack and flickering projections evoke that gray and bitter era. Truncated reminiscences by Shostakovich’s friends overlap with a fitful narration. Recorded swatches of his music weave through hectoring speeches, applause and bits of BBC radio news, which the composer listened to clandestinely. The effect is of a shredded documentary.

When, after an hour, the string quartet begins, a reverent, ancient-sounding canon seeps from the dark periphery of the stage. Each musician stands alone in a tight little circle of light. Gradually, they converge, accompanied by slow-moving mimes and playing as they go, until at last they take their seats in standard quartet formation.

The 15th Quartet, written in 1974, is one of Shostakovich’s last and most defeated works, an airless piling up of slow upon slow--six adagio movements in a row. “Play it so that flies drop dead in midair, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom,” the composer instructed, only half-joking. Nothing could have been less patriotic for a Soviet artist than to express this crushing of the soul, and Shostakovich had gotten into trouble before with the cultural commissars for his excesses of gloom. But he knew that he was finally close to his oft-anticipated death, and depression was one of the few forms of self-indulgence he had left.

Hours after a predawn, post-concert flight from Toronto to New York, the members of the Emerson Quartet straggle into their manager’s office a few blocks from Carnegie Hall, four middle-aged buddies grinning and joshing like college roommates who never fell out of touch. It seems unfair, somehow, that these pleasant, privileged fellows should be so adept at traversing the glaciered emotional landscapes of Shostakovich’s music. The quartet (which will be in residence at the Ojai Music Festival this summer) is 25 years old this season, and while other groups have splintered or endured traumatic turnover in personnel, this one has remained unaltered since 1979. The four friends finish each other’s sentences and casually bat insults across the table with a smile.

“Music is a chemical reaction!” the violist, Lawrence Dutton, exclaims at the end of one particularly rhetorical paragraph.

“Or an allergic reaction,” violinist Philip Setzer comments dryly.

With the exception of the bulky and unflappable Setzer, who radiates a benign, fatherly tranquillity, the quartet’s members exude intensity. Dutton, the tallest and most boyish of the bunch, overflows with enthusiasm, as if playing in a string quartet were a project he had just dreamed up. (“Coming back to a familiar piece like the Mendelssohn A minor after a few years is wonderful!” he says enthusiastically, with a grin. “It’s still great. It’s still hard. It’s still an amazing experience!”)

Eugene Drucker, a slender and olive-skinned violinist with mournful eyes, a corona of tight, black curls and an intensity of expression that could be mistaken for a bad mood, is equally youthful, though in a darker way. Cellist David Finckel, who seems to devote less time to sleep than to tending his goatee, is continually coming up with new outlets for his energies: a record company that he runs out of his living room; recitals that he and his wife, pianist Wu Han, give around the globe (when he is not traveling with the quartet); the La Jolla Chamber Music Summerfest, which the couple managed for three years.

In part, the group has hung together by setting itself new challenges. It plowed through all six Bartok quartets in one sitting, matched all the Beethoven quartets to sympathetic works from the 20th century, made live recordings of Shostakovich’s complete quartets, and even teamed with a physicist, Brian Green, for a series of concert-lectures on the scientific properties of music and the musical properties of science.

It was Setzer, the group’s programming philosopher, who first thought of marrying Shostakovich’s quartets to a literary form, perhaps readings from the composer’s letters. In 1997, he approached Lincoln Center’s programming head, Jane Moss, who was just then assembling a series of events meant to merge concert music with theater. Moss immediately suggested McBurney, whose production of Eugene Ionesco’s “The Chairs” had made critics swoon. McBurney’s brother Gerard, Moss remembered, happened to be a scholar of Russian music.

Setzer and Moss broached the subject with McBurney, who was disappointingly perplexed. “It seems to happen quite often that people give me things others think are impossible to stage,” he says now. “I knew the 15th Quartet and I didn’t think that there was anything I could add. It’s so painful, so quiet, so exquisite, like a delicate piece of glass.” The idea of interspersing its movements with readings or historical explanation seemed impossibly heavy-handed.

But Setzer persisted, and when McBurney eventually heard the group in concert, he developed an irresistible desire to work with them. “I realized that the only way to approach this was not to do anything to the music--neither to accompany it nor to break it up, but to allow it to speak for itself.” Gerard McBurney began feeding his brother an enormous amount of material about Shostakovich, who, 27 years after his death, remains just as elusive, inspiring and deeply frustrating a figure as he was during his troubled lifetime.

Shostakovich wrote music of blistering extremes. An honored--and terrified--citizen of the Soviet Union, a global figure under the thumb of an insular regime and an equivocal propagandist in an undeclared war, he was also a great composer at a time when large numbers of people awaited each new symphony with anxious fervor. He was 20 when the premiere of his First Symphony made him a national celebrity in 1926. But the art that gave him stature could also cut him down, as was made perfectly clear to him in 1936, when Stalin went to see Shostakovich’s international hit opera, “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” and hated it.

Within a few days, Pravda published what may be the most ominous review in the history of music criticism. “The music croaks and hoots and snorts and pants in order to represent love scenes as naturally as possible,” read the anonymous article. “The composer seems to have deliberately encoded its music, twisted all its sounds so that it would appeal only to aesthetes and formalists who have lost all healthy tastes.”

The article then took a thuggish tone, hinting that the composer’s career “might end very badly.” That was enough to convince the 29-year-old Shostakovich that he was about to join the legion of the dead and disappeared. It was a fear, his friends reported, that never really went away.

McBurney had no appetite for preceding Shostakovich’s final quartet with a biographical sketch, so he exploded the narrative into images and aimed for an emotional portrait. “I didn’t want simply to create the story of his life, which would have required a ludicrous amount of compression, but to make a musical response. It’s not sequential, but kaleidoscopic. It comes at you in a series of fragments.” Incidents from the composer’s life flit through the play and the man himself appears in fractured form. A huge close-up of half his face is projected on a screen. Empty articles of clothing are paraded like bodiless puppets. His rough, unpleasant voice emerges dully from speakers.

When McBurney began rehearsals with the Emerson Quartet in New York for the work’s 1998 premiere at Lincoln Center, he had the musicians play the piece over and over again, first sitting in standard formation, then facing the audience instead of each other, then spread out to the corners of the room. When the director and his brother lay on the floor between the players, McBurney suddenly could hear the clarity of the separate lines and feel the counterpoint threading through the air above him. The players too were forced to consider how firmly the music bound them across an empty space and just how far the intimacy of togetherness could stretch.

McBurney cautiously inched the musicians toward theater, often letting ideas flow from them. “They were joking about Jewish influences in Shostakovich’s music and I said, ‘Why not stand in a line and play like a Jewish street band?’ David [Finckel, the cellist] was game and he said, ‘Sure, I’ll play standing up.’ It was incredibly moving. They looked like some pathetic street band, but the music sounded very, very distant, like a memory of an echo.”

“Starting from the back of the stage--it’s what you try to get at when you play in concert,” Setzer says, “when you say, ‘Let’s see if we can play this as if it were coming from another world.’”

Complicite and the Emerson Quartet have performed the piece several dozen times since then, but Dutton still recalls those early rehearsals and first performances as a relentless mixture of anxiety and excitement. “‘Noise of Time’ took us in directions we’d never been pushed before,” he says. “That’s Simon’s genius. He was leading us on a path of self-discovery. He never laid out for us what he wanted to do. We took little, incremental steps. Which didn’t make it easy for us.”

“I was terrified,” Finckel interrupts, firmly upping the ante. “My heart had never beat so fast all through a piece as on that first night in New York.”

Suddenly, the members of the quartet fall into a friendly round of competitive suffering. “I remember having screaming pains through my shoulder from the tension,” Dutton offers.

What shocked the quartet at first was not just the strangeness of playing in a new setup or on a darkened stage, but of having to be constantly conscious of how they looked and what they did. Dutton mentions the chastising experience of sharing the stage with people of great physical presence, actors who shadow the musicians and mimic their every move. “It’s like you feel a spirit around you,” Setzer says.

McBurney didn’t force them to do anything they objected to, but he did insist that they not make any extraneous gestures, that they keep still when they were silent, not slacken into a ritual of ticsand slumped shoulders. Their rests, the players agree, have become more disciplined, more reverential. The quality of quiet is deeper.

Incorporating a theatrical element into straight music-making affects the Emerson’s innermost gears. These days, the quartet plays even its ordinary concerts standing up, as in “The Noise of Time,” and they are pleased with the results. (Finckel sits, but on a raised podium.) “The physical aspect of being able to use your whole body to play is very freeing,” Dutton says. “We sound better, it’s more visually interesting and the communication is easier. I think it goes back to working with Simon.”

If the Emerson Quartet took to McBurney’s directing, it’s partly because the four already perceived an aspect of wordless theater in the music they played. “We always thought in dramatic terms, especially with Shostakovich,” Setzer says. “We thought of [the quartets] as little Chekhov scenes.”

Shostakovich’s music reads like a play: The characters are in frequent discord, the situations are complicated, the emotions jagged. The Emerson Quartet works to render the elegance of friction without smoothing it down.

The four have always refused to fuse their voices into a single, corporate sound. “It’s not too hard to blend,” Dutton says. “Basically, strings blend. What’s interesting is to hear people’s personalities.”

They are audibly there. Setzer, with his grave, patrician reserve, and Drucker, with his feverish, thoughtful intensity, switch off between first and second violin, and when they do, the whole ensemble shifts. Dutton digs into his viola with hell-bent vigor, while Finckel anchors the group with the expansive nobility of his playing.

Their art is keeping these differences in equilibrium, merging them when necessary, as in Shostakovich’s 15th. “The Noise of Time,” with its cryptic signs and tales, brings the audience in on the constant chatter that courses through a string quartet: The Emerson players listen to each other, converse in looks, set tempos with the twitch of a shoulder and ride a crescendo in perfect sync.

In “The Noise of Time,” this intimate collaboration has led the four men into the soul of a solitary man who desperately needed his friends and who also communicated in strange and cryptic ways. McBurney brings up a story told by cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich--Slava to his friends--that is included in “The Noise of Time.” Shostakovich would phone Rostropovich and summon him urgently across Moscow. When he arrived at the composer’s apartment, the two musical men would sit in silence for an hour or more, until Shostakovich got up and said, “Thank you, Slava. Goodbye.”

“Whether you know who Slava is or not, I don’t think it necessarily matters,” McBurney says. “The power of the story is enough. It tells you about Shostakovich’s need for silence, which required the active participation of someone else. The noise on his soul was too much for him to bear alone.”

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“The Noise of Time,” Complicite and the Emerson String Quartet, Wednesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 4 and 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, $16-$50. (310) 825-2101.

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Justin Davidson is classical music critic and cultural writer at large at Newsday, a Tribune company.