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FAB FOUR: Shiffman, Robertson,
Nuttall and Costanza give 150 concerts a year.
Courtesy St. Lawrence String
Quartet |
Elegant. Savage. Brilliant.
Warm. Precise. Fearless. Trying to portray the St. Lawrence
String Quartet, music critics only hint at the shape
of the real thing. Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence
maintains an annual touring schedule of more than 100
concerts, but since 1998 they also have made the Farm
their base to collaborate, educate and inspire (see
sidebar). To get a fuller look at their work, we followed
them through a typical month.
On-campus performance, Dinkelspiel: Haydn’s
Opus 64, No. 2 and Dvorak’s Opus
61 are classical bookends around this concert’s
modern middle, Canadian composer R. Murray Shafer’s
Quartet No. 3. The second movement of the Shafer
invariably startles, with its frenetic playing and scripted
Inuit shouts (“daba, daba, daba, dzhu! dzhu!”),
before it dissolves into the mystical third movement.
Shafer’s piece starts with a cello solo by Chris
Costanza, then violist Lesley Robertson joins in offstage
and violinists Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman enter,
playing, from the auditorium’s back entrances.
For those who don’t consider modern chamber music
conducive to romance, it’s worth noting that the
seven minutes second violinist Shiffman spent in the
lobby awaiting his cue each night during a four-night
run in Vancouver gave him enough time to work up the
nerve to meet his future wife, who was working for the
concert promoter.
The quartet strives for fidelity to a score and the
composer’s intentions, playing music from the
inside out. It chooses living composers for 20 to 30
percent of its repertoire, including works by Shafer,
Osvaldo Golijov and Stanford professors Jonathan Berger
and Mark Applebaum. “Being able to collaborate
is invaluable,” explains Shiffman. “Even
a score bristling with notation can fail to divulge
a composer’s true aim.” Preparing for the
premiere of Golijov’s Yiddishbbuk at
Tanglewood Music Festival in 1992, they asked the composer
to sing what he heard in his imagination. His scream-cry-prayer
clued them in instantly. So began an enduring friendship
and the path toward a Grammy nomination.
The quartet teamed with Berger on a performance of Eli
Eli in memory of Daniel Pearl, ’85, the Wall
Street Journal reporter abducted and killed in
Pakistan in 2002. “When they play Haydn, you think
they play nothing but Haydn,” Berger says. “But
they bring that same commitment and love to everything
they play. There is nothing more rewarding to a composer.”
University of Kansas, Lawrence: Dead-eyed
protesters from a Topeka church await the quartet outside
their concert venue, holding crudely painted banners
emblazoned with swastikas and slogans. The protest centers
on the group’s Canadian origins and the news that
Canada will allow gay marriage. Unruffled, the musicians
pose for pictures alongside the demonstrators.
Walter Hall, University of Toronto: This
is the world premiere of Applebaum’s 20,
an eclectic composition dedicated to his wife of nearly
20 years. A rave review in the Toronto Star calls
the interpretation dazzling, and first violinist Geoff
Nuttall dashing, a nod to his highly physical style—a
quartet trademark.
Applebaum composed 20 specifically for the
quartet. “Every note that went on the page, every
sound that I heard in my head, every physical gesture
that I imagined the players making—these were
all informed by my understanding of and friendship with
the group,” he says.
Shiffman and Nuttall met at Toronto as music students
and formed the quartet in 1989 with violist Robertson
and cellist Marina Hoover. Costanza succeeded Hoover
last year. He plays a cello from Stanford’s Harry
R. Lange collection that lends a warm, dark bass and
woody resonance to his voice in the ensemble. “The
Emerson Quartet’s mentoring helped us get bookings
during the first half of our career,” Nuttall
says. “Having a full schedule has been key to
being stable for 15 years. We might argue one day and
the next day it’s forgotten as we prepare for
an upcoming concert.”
Dormitory concert, Wilbur Hall: The
smell of french fries, hamburgers and ketchup hangs
like a fog in the living room, where several dozen students
fill the sofas or sit on the floor bent over trays of
food. Clad in jeans, the musicians are poised like sprinters
awaiting the starting gun—Nuttall’s gesture
and inhalation—before plunging into Ravel’s
only string quartet. They finish with bows raised in
unison. A student asks if the quality of their playing
depends on the audience; Nuttall says their level of
performance remains the same whether it’s Wilbur
Hall or Carnegie Hall.
A question about concert etiquette pops up, and Nuttall
explains that the convention of holding applause until
the end of a piece is only 50 years old. Robertson likens
clapping in the middle of an opus to hollering “amen”
during a church service—whether it’s appropriate
depends on context. A somber or introspective passage
requires a pregnant silence leading into the next movement,
whereas boisterous movements beg for joyous expression.
On-campus afternoon: Nuttall, Shiffman
and Costanza stroll across campus to Professor John
Felstiner’s class, Imagining the Holocaust. They
will perform the slow movement of Gideon Klein’s
String Trio, written at the Theresienstadt
concentration camp shortly before the young composer’s
death. Nuttall plays the Moravian folk song on which
Trio is based, so students can listen for the
way the melody repeats and transforms. Felstiner explains
that the playing of two strings simultaneously on the
one violin (known as double stops) is to compensate
for the loss of the original second violinist to an
Auschwitz transport.
The three hurry back to Dinkelspiel to play for a group
of schoolchildren. Later, back at Braun, Shiffman stops
at his mailbox to retrieve Berger’s newest score,
Doubles, premiering in June at Bard College.
Students mill around the second floor waiting for lessons;
each member of the quartet teaches three students privately.
They also coach several chamber ensembles.
Lively Arts Concert, Memorial Auditorium: World-famous
violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Simon Mulligan play
to a full house. They team with the quartet for Chausson’s
Opus 21, Concerto in D for Piano, Violin and
String Quartet.
Shiffman also has arranged for the violinist to play
with 15 Stanford Chamber Strings students. In a format
that is more jam session than master class, Bell tells
students not to be afraid to have fun with Bach and
“let it rip.” Before the Allegro, he deadpans,
“I’ll just say it right now—it needs
to be faster.”
The University’s critical mass of artistic resources
has inspired a number of quartet collaborations. In
January 2003, Lively Arts commissioned the quartet,
the Pilobolus Dance Troupe and composer Chris Hatzis
to create My Brother’s Keeper. Lively
Arts also provided the venue for the Chamber Strings
students to play Golijov’s dramatic St. Mark
Passion. At Shiffman’s suggestion, the Cantor
Arts Center held an exhibition of old photographs of
Jewish Eastern Europe last year, during which the quartet
gave several performances.
School visits, Mill Valley: The Mill
Valley Chamber Music Society has invited the quartet
to visit three local schools. When one boy asks about
the “owies” on their necks, the musicians
explain that to keep in top performing shape, they practice
together three to five hours daily, on top of individual
practice. Robertson says that as a child, she never
knew rebellion was an option. Viola practice was like
brushing her teeth or eating broccoli: “You just
did it.”
All four say they usually spend vacations mentoring
conservatory students and playing music festivals like
Spoleto or Tanglewood. They look appalled at the thought
of lounging aimlessly on a beach—though Shiffman
confesses he did go to Hawaii, once, without his violin.
In fact, the quartet founded the Summer Chamber Institute
at Stanford, where amateurs and students meet for hours
of playing, coaching and listening to Nuttall’s
collection of rare LPs. Josh Klein, JD ’02, a
law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50,
JD ’52, studied with quartet members as a student
and has attended the institute. “At the end of
the week, you are playing at a level you never even
knew you were capable of.”
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