concert review: Stanford string quartet marathon

At the Friday noon concert of the Stanford chamber music seminar, the convener invited us all to attend the equally free Saturday evening concert, and enough of us did to overflow the much tinier hall that it was held in. It was a string quartet marathon - six quartets by as many ensembles, lasting 3 1/2 hours with just one brief intermission - and most of the audience craved that crunchy music enough to last the course, though by intermission enough had melted away that the hall was no longer overflowing. This showed the diabolical cleverness of the organizers, who as usual arranged the bill by presenting the groups roughly in order of increasing proficiency.

Not that they weren't all good. The opening ensemble showed some technical weakness in solo displays, but they were impressively together, and navigated Beethoven's Op. 95 with precise hairpin turns of emotional character.

Then we had, in order:
*A gentle, almost tragic Mendelssohn Op. 13
*Prokofiev's Second performed by the most Russian Russians you ever did hear: rough, dark, heavy music-making
*Four Goth women from Australia being immensely civilized in Haydn's Op. 77 No. 2
*Though not lacking in emphasis or percussiveness, an alternately quizzical and wetly impressionistic version of Bartok's Second
*The physically largest players gave us an ethereally light, almost luminescent Beethoven Razumovsky Second

Always nice to be well-filled with such fine string quartetery.