The Verona Quartet is certainly worth watching, above all for the intimate way in which they communicate with each other and with the audience.

The Verona Quartet. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

By Eric Fishman

Jordan Hall filled up slowly on February 8 for a free concert by the Verona Quartet. As might have been predicted—given the venue’s location at NEC—graduate students continued to rush in, instruments in tow, until the minute before the performance began (as well as throughout the concert). The septuagenarian couple sitting next to me was soon joined by two students, who continued a chortling discussion of an unfortunate situation with a roommate until the moment when the lights dimmed. There is something touching about such a mixed-age crowd, unusual at classical concerts.

The Verona Quartet is currently quartet-in-residence at NEC’s Professional String Quartet Training Program, a program that is the brainchild of former Cleveland Quartet cellist Paul Katz. This concert was the Verona’s annual recital performance for this program, and they had clearly prepared intensively for it. The group, made up of relatively young musicians, seems to have been making the most of the “up-and-coming quartet circuit.” This fellowship at NEC follows two seasons as the Graduate Resident String Quartet at Julliard, which itself followed a stint at Indiana University as Quartet-in-Residence.

The concert opened with Haydn’s Quartet in Bb major, Op. 50 No. 1. This piece was part of a set Haydn dedicated to King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, and thus often carries the moniker “Prussian.” These quartets also set off a bidding war among publishers in 1787, after Haydn entered into secret negotiations with two separate publishers in Vienna and London. The Quartet in Bb Major itself carries some of this same deviousness. The Verona did a wonderful job of marking many of these moments of surprise, particularly in the third movement, a minuet and trio. In one instance, Dorothy Ro, the Canadian second violinist, made a lovely joke out of a particular spiccato texture, and the quartet passed around accelerating lines with glee. American violist Abigail Rojanksy slipped a sly smile at a well-coordinated retard between Ro and Jonathan Ong, the Singaporean-born first violinist.

At one point in the second movement, British cellist Jonathan Dormand—a newcomer to the quartet as of August—played a series of scalar runs with a brisk lively energy, intriguingly in opposition of the silky smoothness of the rest of the group. At the end of the last movement, the quartet pulled off their best prank of the night, putting their bows into the air as if concluding at the false ending, and successfully fooling the audience into clapping.

Throughout the Haydn, the members of the quartet were well synchronized, both in their musical and physical movements. I remember a piece of advice Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takács Quartet, gave a quartet I played in many years ago: if you want to improve your synchrony as an ensemble, play Haydn, since there is nowhere to hide in the transparent textures and rhythms. The Verona matched colors and textures well throughout, although I sometimes felt that Ong’s color was a bit dull compared with the rest of the group. Rhythmically, they preserved the dance-like energy of many moments, particularly in the fourth movement. The elderly woman in front of me, who had been glaring at the conservatory students sitting near her for much of the piece, began to gleefully tap her fingers along with the quartet during the last movement.

The highlight of the concert was the next piece, Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 3 in F, Op. 73. This was Shostakovich’s sole composition in the significant year of 1946. Its publication followed the controversial reception of his 9^th Symphony, his inappropriately glib—according to Soviet officials—treatment of “the greatness of the Russian people … liberating our native land from the enemy.” With much of Shostakovich’s work, his resistance to the oppressive circumstances of his life occur mostly beneath the surface, amid an atmosphere of codification and subterfuge. But there is nothing subtle about the subtitles the Borodin Quartet gave for the movements of his third quartet. Although it is disputed whether or not Shostakovich officially endorsed these subtitles, or if they were interpretations of a conversation the quartet had with the composer (while drinking a bit of vodka), they do add significant weight to the piece.

Rojansky stood before the piece to share the subtitles with the audience. After the first one – “calm obliviousness of the coming cataclysm” – there was an audible gasp from the audience. As she proceeded through the rest – “rumblings of unrest,” “the forces of war are unleased,” “homage to the dead,” and “the eternal question: why? And what for?”—there were murmurs of anticipation and wonder.

The quartet did an excellent job tracing the narrative trajectory of this piece. Their color ranged from sonorous and full of vibrato to stark and harsh. Rojanksy opened the second movement with a phenomenally gritty opening line, a mean yet rich sound that broke bow hairs. Even with a mute, Dormand produced a deep, mourning sound. In the third movement, the lower players laid down an evil sounding base – but unfortunately Ong came in with too pretty and nice a sound, ruining the frightening effect. Ro took over with more roughness, and the graduate students in front of me started to bang their heads along, grinning, with the forceful ending of the movement. Over a sparse cello line at the end of the fourth movement, Rojanksy almost stood up with the intensity of her viola’s wailing. In the fifth movement, the quartet’s play with tone and texture seemed to imply Shostakovich’s essaying of different possibilities in response to his own unanswerable question.

Shostakovich himself opposed programmatic music, once saying about his Seventh Symphony that “music, real music, is never attached literally to a theme.” Yet there is no denying the significance this quartet had for Shostakovich.

As cellist Elizabeth Wilson recounts:

Only once did we see Shostakovich visibly moved by his own music. We were rehearsing the Third Quartet. He’d promised to stop us when he had any remarks to make … But after each movement ended he just waved us on … When we finished playing he sat quite still in silence like a wounded bird, tears streaming down his face.

After the Verona finished the fifth movement with a morendo non-vibrato ending, there was a similarly magnetic silence. No one dared move while the group held their bows still in midair. This was one of those irreplaceable moments of group experience that happen at concerts, when our individual selves fade out for a moment without breath – before we come back to ourselves to applaud.

The concert closed, after intermission, with Brahms’s Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 51 no. 2. The quartet started the first movement at an almost startlingly fast tempo, considering the composer’s marking of allegro non troppo. It felt rushed. In the second movement, Dormand let the group with a burnished mahogany sound, creating a wonderful sense of “gemütlichkeit,” or warm closeness and comfort. Throughout the concert, I was impressed by Dormand’s range of colors, and he managed to be central to the sound of the quartet without drowning out the smaller instruments. His sonic presence reminded me of Joel Krosnick, longtime cellist of the Julliard Quartet. Overall, however, the energy in group was not quite as high in the Brahms as in the Shostakovich, and they seemed to edge towards being a bit safer—and less interesting—in their choices of texture.

The Verona Quartet is certainly worth watching, above all for the intimate way in which the communicate with each other and with the audience. They next perform in the Boston area with the Borromeo Quartet, for a sold-out concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18. They will also be playing a free concert at Old South Meeting House on April 13.

Eric Fishman is an educator, writer, translator, and cellist. He studied cello at Yale School of Music and Conservatoire de Paris. He now teaches elementary school and translates French poetry.