concert review: Afiara String Quartet
Dec. 1st, 2008 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacRounded off a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend (two festive dinners, one with family, the other with friends, enough leftovers for ... a while) with a concert at le petit Trianon. This is not one of your bland, undifferentiated young quartets. They dig into the music, playing a raw, rough sound with grit and plenty of heavy accents. This made them the perfect ensemble to tackle Beethoven's gnarly little Op. 95. They treated Haydn's late Op. 76 No. 5 pretty much the same way: low on the courtly, high on the commanding. Also highly appropriate, a weird little Gypsy tune potpourri, with lots of glissandi and note-bending, under the title "Pannonia Boundless" by Aleksandra Vrebalov.
Accompanied by the estimable Stephen Prutsman, they gave a smoother but not less intense performance of Dvorak's Op. 81 Piano Quintet, with thumping dances and beautifully hushed pauses. And as an encore, just to get back to the raw end of their sound, Prutsman's arrangement of Weather Report's "Birdland", which not surprisingly I like a lot better from a piano quintet than in other forms.
Accompanied by the estimable Stephen Prutsman, they gave a smoother but not less intense performance of Dvorak's Op. 81 Piano Quintet, with thumping dances and beautifully hushed pauses. And as an encore, just to get back to the raw end of their sound, Prutsman's arrangement of Weather Report's "Birdland", which not surprisingly I like a lot better from a piano quintet than in other forms.
