UNITED IN SOUND

The Dover Quartet ¤ (l-r) violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, cellist Camden Shaw and violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt ¤ performing with pianist Emanuel Ax in April 2018 in the Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music in Illinois

MICHAEL DEL ROSARIO / BIENEN SCHOOL OF MUSIC

‘When we first came together, we had a very similar concept of sound,’ says violinist Joel Link. ‘So, trying to achieve a perfect blend was never something that took a lot of e ort.’

I’m speaking to the Dover Quartet via Zoom at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in July. But fortunately for the four players - and for musicians and audiences in general - lockdown has lifted su€ ciently for them to be in the same place at the same time. . e group has, in fact, been rehearsing and recording for three weeks prior to our conversation, and despite several months spent apart in their separate homes - the longest period since forming at the Curtis Institute of Music twelve years ago - the members have recaptured their dynamic easily. Wasting little time, they are deep in recording mode for the second volume of their complete Beethoven cycle for Cedille Records (the first of which was released in September) and are currently performing a series of pared-down concerts to live, socially distanced audiences at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival in Colorado.

Yet despite their clear synchronicity of purpose, violinists Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and cellist Camden Shaw are evidently individual characters and musicians in their own right. Having heard them perform in 2016 as returning winners of the Ban International String Quartet Competition’s 2013 edition, and again at The Strad ’s own Stradfest event for young performers in London in 2019, I can attest to the richness and complexity of their sound - a combination of four distinct voices united in a common vision.

Pajaro-van de Stadt picks up from Link: ‘At Curtis and then at Rice University, where we completed a master’s degree in string quartet studies [2011-13], we had a number of in£ uential coaches, including Shmuel Ashkenasi of the Vermeer Quartet, who was always the harshest of our teachers.’ Link cuts in, jokingly: ‘And remained harsh for a long time afterwards!’ Pajaro-van de Stadt resumes: ‘But that’s what made his words so meaningful. We were also mentored by the Guarneri Quartet. I’ve always admired that the Guarneri sounds like a group, but that each member has such a speci.c style of playing. .at’s my ideal concept of a quartet.’

Performing with percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum for Chamber Music Northwest in July 2018

CHAMBER MUSIC NORTHWEST

‘RECORDING THE BEETHOVEN QUARTETS IS LIKE HAVING A CHILD. YOU’RE NEVER TRULY READY, BUT AT A CERTAIN POINT YOU JUST HAVE TO DIVE IN AND DO IT’ - BRYAN LEE, VIOLIN

Certainly, this model has stood the group in good stead over.the past few years. Following their career-launching Ban. win came the 2016-18 Cleveland Quartet Award, one of the inaugural Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Awards in 2016 and.an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2017. Among several residencies held by the quartet are an ongoing placement (which began in 2015) at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a threeyear .appointment (from 2018) at the Kennedy Center, Washington DC. .ey have also recently been announced as.the .rst Penelope P. Watkins Ensemble-in-Residence at Curtis, a position that not only reunites them with their alma.mater, but also provides a secure base from which to explore and innovate.

For the past few years, too, they have been .lmed on the road, in performance and in rehearsal, for a warts-and-all documentary called Strings Attached (bit.ly/2ZL1JyT) about the life of a string quartet, directed by Bruce Broder.The film was screened at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society’s Filmusic Festival this summer, and was also shown at the Ban. International String Quartet Festival’s virtual edition in September.

Now a well-established and settled ensemble, the Dover has turned to Beethoven (as have so many in the composer’s 250th anniversary year) following earlier recordings of Shostakovich, Mozart and Schumann. Do these recordings - released in three volumes of the composer’s early, middle and late quartets - represent a shift for the group from talented young stars to mature artists?

‘I feel like recording the Beethoven quartets is like having a child,’ says Lee. ‘You’re never truly ready, but at a certain point you just have to dive in and do it.’ Pajaro-van de Stadt chimes in: ‘You can think of a recording typically as something that immortalises your interpretation. But I believe a healthier and.more accurate way to look at the process is of it being a snapshot of where you were at that time. We certainly waited to record the cycle until after performing the quartets in concert

A socially distanced community concert in the Music Box mobile performance stage at Colorado’s Bravo! Vail festival in July 2020

TOMAS COHEN PHOTOGRAPHY / BRAVO! VAIL

'IF I HAD MY DREAM WAY OF MAKING THESE BEETHOVEN ALBUMS, WOULD RECORD THEM IN DIFFERENT SPACES, BECAUSE ACOUSTICALLY WHAT THEY NEED IS QUITE DIFFERENT' - CAMDEN SHAW, CELLO

These works do feel like familiar friends - and sometimes enemies!’ says Shaw. ‘But it’s denitely nice to be able to take advantage of the recording process as we grow. is will never be a nished product, and if we ever record the works again they will absolutely sound dierent, as we will have dierent ideas. But to be able to work on this cycle at a relatively young age has been fascinating, and we have got to know each piece much more intimately as we have recorded it.’

e sheer variety in the quartets, and the progression in temperament and style from the early to the late compositions, is at once a challenge and a joy. ‘If I had my dream way of making these albums, I would record them in dierent spaces,’ Shaw continues, ‘because acoustically what they need is quite dierent. For example, for the slow movement of op.132 you would want to be in the most ringing, glowing and cosmically expansive space possible. But if you were recording the last movement of op.59 no.3 in that same space you would have a lot of problems hearing the detail. And essentially, the album listening experience would be disrupted if we were to move from space to space, so we have had to keep the venue consistent.’ Indeed, they are making all their Beethoven recordings in Sauder Concert Hall at Goshen College, Indiana.

Of less importance to the group in general is the idea of matching bowings between players. An insistence on sticking rigidly to the same interpretative cues from concert to concert denies space for their dierent playing styles, and can rob a performance of its spontaneity and excitement - particularly if the work has been played on numerous occasions throughout a season.

‘We have found that matching bowings can be a huge waste of rehearsal time,’ says Lee. ‘As long as our intent is the same, we.try to allow each person the freedom to do what works for.them.’ Shaw continues: ‘If you’re really married to one bowing, you won’t be able to adjust to dierent acoustics. Also, coming back to what Milena said about individual voices, we like everyone to be pretty free to decide on what works for them on a given night.’ Link laughs: ‘It’s like Shmuel Ashkenasi said to us: “You must have a bowing for when your colleagues are kind, and a bowing for when your colleagues are not kind!”’

Such a flexible attitude has served the group well when performing the same work thirty or forty times during a season. ‘When you’re in a group of perfectionists, you all want to do your best on stage and this means you rehearse and come up with ideas and write musical decisions in your part,’ says Pajaro-van de Stadt. ‘But that can mean that when someone does something you don’t expect during a performance, you can fall into the trap of digging in your heels and failing to be spontaneous. To avoid this trap, before a performance we’ve sometimes erased everything we previously wrote in our parts, and it has felt so much better, as no one has felt married to a speci.c interpretation or dynamic.’

Of course, having the con.dence to be creative in the moment can only be achieved when all members of a group have complete trust in each other. As the years have passed, the Dover players have adapted their rehearsal techniques to be more streamlined, with less conversation and focus on ‘that gritty, grinding sort of rehearsal’, according to Lee. Pajaro-van de Stadt concurs: ‘After so many years together, we can simply play through something, not talk too much and then play through it again - and it’s already improved. .ere’s more intuition than there was in the beginning.’

Being Creative in the moment: a November 2019 concert at the Bienen School of Music, where the quartet is resident

One tried and tested way of working effciently was perfected during the Ban competition, and it’s now referred to by the players as the ‘Ban technique’. ‘If we’re close to a performance or a recording and don’t have too much time, everyone writes down a list of everything that bothered them after a run-through of the piece,’ explains Shaw. ‘.en we systematically go through all the lists to make sure that every person is able to address each one of their issues. What’s interesting is that inevitably people end up responding to the same passages! Perhaps with slightly dierent solutions, but it’s a very effcient system.’

Pajaro-van de Stadt picks up: ‘.at reminds me of how Bryan once described a quartet that works democratically as a “four-way dictatorship”. But this technique only functions if you don’t waste time arguing about semantics. For example, if.someone says, “.at should sound sweet,” and then someone else gets in a hu and argues, “No, it should be tender -”’ ‘Warm!’ interjects Shaw, at which the others laugh.

With so much experience gained over the years, the quartet spends a good deal of time mentoring up-and-coming ensembles through its university residencies. .e Northwestern post includes a sizeable chamber coaching component, and the new Curtis placement incorporates traditional teaching alongside performing and the.development of technological ideas to aid student learning and to broaden audience awareness. .ese placements go hand in hand with the players’ tours to numerous educational establishments in any given season, where they give visiting masterclasses and less formal coaching.

‘One major bene.t for students if all four of us take a masterclass together is that sometimes we disagree on an interpretative point, and that’s really good for them to see,’ says.Pajaro-van de Stadt. ‘.e longer we teach, the more we’re gaining an intuition about how to cater our teaching styles to each individual student or group,’ she continues. ‘But we usually try to steer clear of getting too involved in the technical side of things, because these students have private teachers who know them far better than we do.’

If there’s one idea - or ‘gospel’ as Link jokingly describes it - that the quartet try to pass to their younger charges, it’s the idea of ‘hypermetre’, a concept they picked up from Ashkenasi during their own studies, and something that is not often taught or discussed in musical circles. ‘.is is a central philosophy of our group that has become more important as we.have grown older,’ shares Shaw. ‘Once someone points it out to you, you can’t stop thinking about it. It has to do with dividing lengths of musical time into strong or weak periods that undulate, just like a sound vibration. It happens across a number of dierent dimensions simultaneously - most people manage it reasonably well over the smaller time spaces, but are less successful at the broader level.’

‘It’s similar to the hierarchy in an average 4/4 bar, in terms of which beat is the strongest and which is weaker,’ adds Pajarovan de Stadt. ‘So, one beat will have a more downward feel to it and another beat will have a leading feel. It’s the same concept but rather than dealing with a single bar, it’s within a phrase.’

‘It works on so many levels, so that all of the music is vibrating,’ enthuses Shaw. ‘So, for example, Mozart might have a hypermetre of twelve bars, and usually he will assign three bars to each hypermetre beat, but then in the next twelve bars he might switch things so that the new hypermetre beat will be four bars instead of three. If you don’t pay attention you might phrase something a little backwards, or simply not notice the brilliance of how he achieved the result.’

The group works democratically as a 'four-way dictatorship’

The group’s enthusiasm for this ‘nerdy’ concept, as Shaw half-apologetically half-jokingly describes it, is evident, even through a Zoom screen, and I can see quite clearly how their infectious, easy energy has earned them not only the performing components of their multiple residencies, but the educational strands as well. It is this openness and passion that enabled them to gel so easily when .rst coming together at Curtis back in 2008 to perform Berg’s .endishly complicated String Quartet op.3, and to view this as ‘a nice challenge’, according to Pajaro-van de Stadt. It was shortly afterwards that their mentor Ashkenasi posed the question: ‘Have you guys considered getting married?’ - purely in playing terms, of course. Clearly, after twelve years, the honeymoon isn’t over.

WIN THE DOVER QUARTET’S NEW BEETHOVEN RECORDING

ROY COX

The first volume of the Dover Quartet’s complete Beethoven String Quartets is out now on Cedille Records. For your chance to win one of ten copies, submit your details at bit.ly/2Zzlkj9 Closing date 31 December 2020