The cello was the first musical instrument I ever played. As
such, I’ve always had a soft spot for the rhythm section/harmony players. Too
often they get stuck with the most boring part of the score and, what’s worse,
are expected to repeat that one boring line ad nauseam while everybody else in
the group gets to show off and play the fun melodic stuff.
That’s why I was so pleased to hear the opening piece by the
Parker Quartet, an arrangement by Haydn which the program helpfully described
as perhaps the first quartet score to give the cello and viola a chance to have
the melody alongside the violins. For this dynamic to work, the piece requires
the harmony players to be as accomplished as the violinists, and fortunately
that was no problem at all for the Parker Quartet. Cellist Kee-Hyun Kim and
violist Jessica Bodner are both incredibly talented players, and so expressive
in their style it almost felt like they were doing a sort of dance at times.
This is not to take anything away from violinists Daniel
Chong and Karen Kim, who were equally stunning. I’m just biased towards the
lower end of the musical spectrum and I invariably end up paying more attention
to what the oft-unnoticed players are doing.
After the Haydn piece, the quartet moved into an arrangement
by Bartók, who I like to think of as the most “heavy metal” of the classical
composers. This also makes him one of my favorites (a little dissonance never
hurt anybody). This particular piece, however, included a four note motif which
was supposed to perfectly describe a woman Bartók had an interest in. Except
she shot him down, so in this piece he reversed the motif to show his
disappointment (or some other melancholy nonsense like that).
That’s all a bit too artsy for me, and that four-note
sequence was always noticeably out of place, but the rest of the piece was
fantastic and more than made up for the old composer’s emo tendencies. All in
all, I’d love to see the Parker
Quartet around the Iowa City area more often.
Brian
