For the nation’s leading classical ensembles, the summer months promise no great respite, but they do portend a change in scenery. As major symphony orchestras decamp to festival residencies, chamber groups move about too, riding a special summer circuit. One stop lies near the sleepy hamlet of Katonah, New York: the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts. For its eightieth season, Caramoor sported an attractive summer-festival schedule of chamber performances, which included a July 6 concert featuring the Escher String Quartet, joined in a final piece by the pianist Alessio Bax.
It was regrettable that the concert—held at Caramoor’s Venetian Theater, beneath a tent—fell on a hot, humid day. The theater, which seats some 1,500, wound up about three-fifths full. But spectators and musicians alike braved the weather admirably.
First on the program was Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, his only completed quartet, of which the second movement is well known but the first and third are considerably less so. That’s because Barber adapted the middle movement for his renowned Adagio for Strings, which Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra premiered in a national broadcast. The Adagio became Barber’s best-known work, earning the composer substantial royalties that helped him purchase his estate in Mount Kisco, only a short drive from Caramoor. It was geographically fitting, then, to be able to appreciate the strains of the Adagio in the original, bookended context of the quartet.
The Escher foursome sat close to the edge of the stage and did not tune but instead began Barber’s quartet virtually straightaway. They played the first movement’s dramatic tutti motif with great coordination and power. To the movement’s subsequent, slower themes they lent a pensive sensibility interrupted only by tutti outbursts. I enjoyed the drama of the cellist Brook Speltz’s open string.
The group handled the Adagio movement beautifully, their dynamics and layering appropriately pure and each instrument’s voice distinguishable even in chords. The rendition was marked by a masterly interplay in which each player answered the others. Each adapted Barber’s somber, yearning melody to the distinct advantages of his instrument. Impressively, the foursome also took breaths in unison between phrases.
In the brief third movement, the players adapted well to certain faster, jumpy passages, retaining their coordination.
Next on the program came an intriguing entry: a long unpublished work that I had not heard before, Florence Price’s Quartet No. 2 in A minor, which was discovered only in 2019. Price’s symphonic works have been increasingly performed in recent years, and it was good to learn that the mixture of styles and influences that characterizes those works can be heard also in her chamber music.
The first movement gave the second violinist, Bryan Lee (substituting for Brendan Speltz, Brook’s brother, absent due to injury), a rhythmic role that unfolded beneath melody lines inspired by the American South. The foursome’s playing proved largely crisp and clear, with only an occasional scratchy edge to the melody—possibly a stylistic choice.
The second movement was meditative in its character. In chords, the group achieved an elegant blend, while the first violinist, Adam Barnett-Hart, put trills to good, atmospheric use. In faster moments the playing was restrained, not overanxious.
The boisterous third movement was my favorite and plainly the group’s as well. Ordinarily restrained in motion, the four players eagerly added more physicality to their performance. Marked as a “Juba,” an African American dance involving clapping, stamping, and body-patting, the third movement reproduced instrumentally its percussive features. Speltz’s cello employed staccato, as did Pierre Lapointe’s viola, both perhaps mimicking drums. The violins slid into notes and used bouncing bow strokes, something not unlike fiddling. The whole enterprise was splendidly realized.
The fourth movement was more frenetic in its construction, somewhat choppier, and overall less fun. It did offer a showcase for Barnett-Hart’s first violin, which played sweetly above the other instruments.
The program’s final listing was an unqualified masterpiece: Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, for which the Italian-born pianist Alessio Bax joined the Escher Quartet onstage, sitting directly behind the group—all of them fortified in the heat by water bottles and towelettes.
Key to Dvořák’s quintet is that it treats each instrument as an equally important voice that engages the others. It does not merely suspend solos over accompaniment, and therefore a performance should take care not to prioritize the piano at the expense of the strings. In this respect, the Escher–Bax rendition did it justice.
In approaching Dvořák’s first movement, all five musicians achieved a wonderfully lyrical sound, trading themes and finishing each other’s phrases in a mesmerizing melodic conversation. Credit is due to Speltz for his nonverbal cues, helping the players stay together.
This robust melodic exchange continued into the second movement, in which Bax’s distinctive contributions became clearer. His playing was soft, airy, and understated; he sustained his notes beautifully. Lapointe, meanwhile, passionately played the great part that Dvořák, himself a violist, wrote for the instrument. Barnett-Hart and Lee adroitly developed the themes on violin, and Speltz achieved an impressive clarity of tone on cello, using long, smooth bow strokes.
In the third movement, Bax employed a bouncy touch that served well the movement’s excited character and corresponded to the lower strings’ emphasis on pizzicato. In the fourth, his light, agile touch complemented the strings’ runs up and down their fingerboards as well as several staccato moments that yielded audible bow strokes.
All in all, Caramoor’s July 6 concert marked an outstanding installment in this summer’s catalogue of chamber performances.
