Just a short note, and this in the intellectual equivelant of crayon, from
the Rockport Chamber music festival. Rockport is the center of a arts show,
and an annual chamber music festival - one that attracts name, and soon to
be name performers to a small barn in the center of a reformed New England
fishing village.

Rather then spending a great deal of time on the Bretano's animated
style of playing and growing resume - there is only time for a few short
impressions.  The Bretano style is in the mold of the Emmerson quartet's
plushness balanced with a certain thinness of violins, and a very equal
voicing approach.  It works well in Haydn, Schostakovich and Beethoven -
less so in some other composers.

The program Beethoven 18/3, Mackey's "String Theory" and a Brahms Sextet
with two loaners from the Borromero.

Beethoven's 18/3 is cast as young man's Haydn, a kind of lighter on the
tricks, heavier on the theatrics collection of dance tunes, with only a
few moments pause or deeper reflection.  The first movement was fluid,
and the finale's rhythms were given a kind of bounce that held up well.

Mackey is one of those composers who fits into the description of "spoonful
of sugar modernism". His quartet tells the story of how he went to a lecture
on string theory, came away confused, got depressed that the word was so
incomprehensible, and said "ah heck, lets just party." It is a nice quartet
- he should set it to music some time.

The opening is promisng enough, with a chromatic note figure that might be
the engine in a work by Berg or Schostakovich, and there are some layered
possibilities in it that he exploits through the work.  But the work is
a series of sketchs - a few with excellent effects in them - but with a
tremendous amount of insistent noodling and lack of genuine structural
insight.  Mackey - half way between a work and a mechanism piece which
runs on some minimalist paramater - has come up with neither.

The Brahms began badly, then, a miracle happened - a string went out of
tune and the group started over.  Many of the defects of the first two
movements can be ascribed to "quartet playing" with each member over doing
his solo statement of the melody - rather than aiming at a kind of unity
of the parts that this work requires.  The middle of the slow movement this
unity was found beneath the cello playing of Kim from the Borromero - and
built steadily to an expressive close.  The last movement continued in this
vein, with its sighing main motive being the focus of the playing.

Stirling Newberry
http://www.mp3.com/ssn
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