DUBLIN - Theaters are closed here on Sunday - the Abbey, the Peacock,
others are all dark - but hark!  there are lights on at the entrance to
the Gate Theatre.  Ask what's happening, and you will be told that the
cast of Brian Friel' new play, "Performances," is giving a concert.
Excuse me?

Intrigued by that puzzle, you go in and discover the Alba String
Quartet holding sway in the theater, with a brief but excellent program
of Schubert's Quartettsatz in C minor, Mozart's Quartet in E flat,
Webern's "Langsamer Satz," and Janacek's String Quartet No. 2.

This last item on the program, Janacek's 1928 "Intimate Letters" quartet,
provides for yet another "first," unless you have already attended a
chamber-music concert that had been rehearsed nightly, with audience,
for over a month.

This is how all those strange items come together: Friel's play is about
Janacek and his decade-long pursuit of Kamilla Stosslova, a happily
married 26-year-old when the composer, age 62, became possessed with
her.

"Consummation" of the one-sided affair came in Quartet No. 2, an
ecstatically happy, "Tristan"-passionate, achingly beautiful work by
Janacek at 74, at the end of a troubled, but ultimately redeemed, life.

The play - by the author of "Translations" and "Dancing at Lughnasa" -
has a fictional graduate student researching Janacek's life, it brings
in the already dead composer to answer her questions, and completes the
cast with members of the Alba: Nicola Sweeney and Jana Ludvickova
(violins), Fay Sweet (viola), and Tony Woollard (cello).

The musicians perform the first two movements of "Intimate Letters"
off-stage, while the text of some of those letters is spoken and discussed
on-stage; then the quartet plays on-stage and talks about the music while
the actor playing Janacek (Ion Caramitru), contemplates some of letters,
projected on the walls, in silence.

On Sunday then, the Alba Quartet musicians stepped out of their "roles"
as the quartet in the play, and after playing what Richard Pine's program
notes call this "massive soliloquy on longing and passion," more or less
as background music for a month - and performed it, front and center,
in its entirety, uninterrupted.

How was it?  Glorious.  The Alba is a young group, with a young,
vigorous, somewhat raw sound, quite different from the end-of-life,
Verdi "Falstaff"/Shakespeare "Tempest"-category "Intimate Letters" may
be thought to require.  And yet, the technically flawless, deeply-felt
reading came across superbly.

There are so many complexities and contradictions about this work, not
least of it being in the music itself: Janacek had nothing but disdain
for Wagnerian romanticism and "pompous chord progressions," but his two
quartets are quintessentially romantic.

The Alba managed to resolve paradoxes all evening long: those of excess
and classicism in the Schubert, elegance and deep feelings in the Mozart,
chromaticism and gentle, "old-fashioned" tonality in the Webern, and -
especially - bridging pain and happiness in Janacek's music the way the
composer managed to accomplish that both in music and life.

"Intimate Letters" says one is never too old for passion; the Alba
performance proved one is never too young to have mature wisdom of
expression.

Janos Gereben/SF
(In Wexford, 10/20-22, in London, 10/23-27)
www.sfcv.org