Arts & Events

Celebrating their 20^th Anniversary as a group, the Cypress String Quartet opened their 2015-16 season with two concerts at Berkeley’s Maybeck Recital Hall in their salon series. The first concert, on Friday, October 16, featured String Quartet No. 6 by George Tsontakis and Beethoven’s majestic Op. 130 Quartet, which latter was performed with its original finale, Die Große Fugue. For the second concert, which I attended on Friday, October 23, Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 1 Quartet replaced the Tsontakis and was followed after intermission by the Op. 130 Quartet. 

The Cypress String Quartet is comprised of Cecily Ward on violin, Tom Stone on second violin, Ethan Filner on viola, and Jennifer Kloetzel on cello.  

It had been nearly twenty years since I attended a concert in the Maybeck Recital Hall. I recall hearing a classical guitar recital here during jazz pianist Dick Wittington’s tenure as resident owner of the Maybeck Recital Hall. This intimate space, lovingly built by Bernard Maybeck in 1914, was conceived as a studio for the piano teacher Alma Kennedy, who gave lessons here to the daughter of the Nixon family who lived next door. Alma Kennedy lived in the small studio apartment that is part of the Recital Hall. The original Recital Hall burned down in the 1923 fire that also claimed the nearby Hillside Club; and, like the Hillside Club, it was rebuilt in 1923 according to Maybeck’s original design.  

Regular readers of the Berkeley Daily Planet will know that I have often railed against performances of chamber music in cavernous auditoriums such as Zellerbach Hall, and I have championed Maybeck’s Hillside Club as an ideal venue for chamber music. However, on hearing the Cypress String Quartet in the even more intimate Maybeck Recital Hall, I now champion this venue as the ideal space for chamber music. Quite a bit smaller than the Hillside Club, which holds 200 persons when set up in concert format, the Maybeck Recital Hall holds about 40 persons. The sense of immediacy here is unparalleled.  

Prior to opening the concert with Beethoven’s Op. 18 Quartet, No. 1, violinist Cecily Ward spoke about this work, which was actually composed after the Op. 18, No. 3 Quartet. Beethoven published this as No. 1, Ward maintained, specifically because this work demonstrates all that Beethoven had learned from the string quartets of Haydn and Mozart. The opening movement, Ward explained, is built on a five-note sequence that recurs repeatedly throughout this movement; and she invited cellist Jennifer Kloetzel to play this five-note sequence. As we subsequently heard, Beethoven explores this sequence of notes in many variations, some of them quite witty. The Adagio second movement, inspired by the tomb scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, opens with cello, viola and second violin playing melancholy low notes, soon joined by the first violin playing a yearning motif above the bass. Long, expansive melodies follow, occasionally broken by moments of silence. Towards the end of this movement, the cello states a last romantic theme, then the music cascades in a descent played first by the viola, then by the second violin, and, finally, by the first violin. The third movement, a scherzo, breaks the mood of gloom and establishes a witty, playful mood. The final movement, marked Allegro, pays homage to Mozart’s D-major Quartet, K. 499, and ends with a coda in which Beethoven explores counterpoint in a witty and imaginative manner. Hearing the Cypress Quartet play this work in the intimate and inviting space of the Maybeck Recital Hall was a wonderful experience. In this wood-paneled hall enlivened by tall Gothic-style leaded-glass windows culminating in pointed arches, the immediacy of the music was very powerful. Fortissimo attacks made a visceral impact on the listener. One felt the music in one’s guts. 

The same could be said, but in spades, for the Op. 130 Quartet in B-flat, which was played after intermission. This monumental work in six movements is a truly revolutionary piece of music, especially when it is played as Beethoven originally intended with Die Große Fugue as the final movement. To their immense credit, the Cypress Quartet played it this way, and the stark power of this amazing work shone through in every measure. The opening Adagio, ma non troppo-Allegro, is a very expansive movement, and it is full of brooding recollections of sorrow and suffering amidst agitated outbursts of raw pain. The second movement, a brief Presto, features a lively scherzo that simply expresses the exuberance of joyful music-making. However, I did note that on three occasions when the first violin reached for the highest note, Cecily Ward’s top note was a bit shrill. The third movement is marked Poco scherzoso, and it features pizzicato plucking from the three low-pitched instruments, while the first violin works the high range. Next comes a rustic German dance movement, marked Alla danza tedesca. Here Beethoven introduces high-stepping dance rhythms, then embarks on a series of intellectual variations on the basic theme. However, Beethoven suddenly slows everything down, and the cello plays the basic theme in a slow, poignant manner, as if the composer suddenly realized his own intellectual distance from this rustic dance and the sense of community such a country dance presupposes. After one last reiteration of the dance music, Beethoven launches into the next movement, the heart-rending Cavatina. 

Into this Cavatina Beethoven poured all the pain and suffering he had experienced in his life – the struggle with deafness, the repeated disappointments in love, and the sense of lonely isolation stemming both from his deafness and from the immense gap between his own exalted notion of music and the more pedestrian expectations of his public. The tragedy expressed in the Cavatina, according to J.W.N. Sullivan, is the “yearning for the unattainable, for that close human intimacy, that love and sympathy, that Beethoven never experienced.” Beethoven’s friend Karl Holz reported that the composer “wrote the Cavatina (‘short aria’) amid sorrows and tears; never did his music breathe so heart-felt an inspiration, and even the memory of this movement brought tears to his eyes.”  

After the pain and sorrow of the Cavatina, Beethoven needed something that would express the overcoming of all obstacles and a reaffirmation of life. What Beethoven turned to was Bach and the fugue. By going back to the roots of classical music, Beethoven took on the task of demonstrating that in his mastery of counterpoint he found his reaffirmation of life and his overcoming of all obstacles. As played here by the Cypress String Quartet, Die Große Fugue was an overwhelming tour de force, bringing this Op. 130 Quartet to a triumphant close. 

As an encore, the Cypress Quartet played the somewhat different fugue that closes Beethoven’s earlier Op. 59, No. 3 Quartet. All in all, I exited the Maybeck Recital Hall feeling I had just experienced one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever attended.