EMBRACING THE STRANGE

The Calidore Quartet has just released the first in its cycle of late Beethoven quartets. Peter Quantrill hears from two of the players about how this music involves intense preparation and a sense of ‘leaning into the weird’

MARCO BORGGREVE

A Beethovencycle on record has been a long-held goal of the Calidore Quartet – as it is for most professional quartets – ‘probably since our inception’, says second violinist Ryan Meehan (right). The quartet’s line-up has not changed since its members found each other as graduate students at the Colburn School, Los Angeles, in 2010: violinists Jeffrey Myers and Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry and cellist Estelle Choi.

More than a decade down the road, continues Meehan, ‘we felt we’d lived with them long enough. We had the example of the Guarneri Quartet, who were mentors for us. They recorded all the Beethovens quite early on, and again at the end of their career.’ Having given several complete cycles in the run-up to the Beethoven anniversary year of 2020, the Calidores found that the pandemic afforded them the time and space to dig deeper into each work. In February 2021 they embarked on the first of several week-long sessions, which Signum are releasing in three sets, beginning with the late quartets.

The veteran US record producer and engineer Judith Sherman is in one sense the driving force of the enterprise – though Meehan and Choi give her a good deal more credit than that. The quartet met Sherman at a concert in their adopted home of New York, and were understandably keen to secure the cooperation of a producer who already had three Beethoven cycles to her name, recorded by the Cleveland, Colorado and Alexander quartets. According to Choi (above), ‘She says this will be her last!’

‘Judy allows us room to perform under the microphones,’ she continues. ‘That’s an underrated quality when it comes to finding a producer. I like how honest she is in terms of the details of the process – playing the right rhythms, in tune, together. But she keeps the flow going.’

The players had in mind the microphones as additional ears, but even with several albums under their belts (most recently Babel, featuring Schumann, Shostakovich and Caroline Shaw; a Strad Recommends in November 2020), they were sometimes surprised by the result, especially in the early sessions, when quartet and producer were getting to know each other. ‘We discovered ensemble issues in places we hadn’t been aware of,’ says Choi. ‘Sometimes in pairings, one instrument with another, we had taken for granted that we were playing together, and Judy had to tell us that we weren’t! After the first set of sessions we knew what to listen for and how to prepare for the next set with an ultra-critical ear. We began saying in rehearsal, “I don’t think Judy would approve of that!” It has been so beneficial to get that kind of feedback.’

‘AFTER THE FIRST SET OF SESSIONS WE KNEW WHAT TO LISTEN FOR AND HOW TO PREPARE FOR THE NEXT SET WITH AN ULTRA-CRITICAL EAR’

Balance, and the difference between how the Calidore players heard themselves and how the microphones picked them up, was another issue in the early sessions. Choi recalls: ‘Judy would quite often tell us, “You’re demolishing the main line – just get out of the way!” We think that we’re supporting each other and highlighting each part, but under the microphone it sounds quite different.’

In my experience, musicians like to maintain what is for the most part a pleasant fiction of ‘long-take’ philosophy, in which the dream of a perfected concert performance collides with the hard reality of, say, a slightly flat C in bar 4. The Calidore members have run through each movement or a substantial section of it, and then gone behind the glass to listen to it with Sherman. Then the playing and the polishing of each movement continues, but once Sherman feels she has a complete movement ‘in the can’, the quartet plays it through once more as a ‘Take A’. ‘We can forget about any inhibitions and give everything,’ according to Choi. Much of the finished article on the Signum set is drawn from these ‘Take A’ performances.

The Calidore Quartet (l–r) Jeffrey Myers, Ryan Meehan, Jeremy Berry and Estelle Choi

CARLIN MA

Beethoven is never easy, especially not the late quartets, but I wondered if some pieces were more straightforward to capture than the Calidore anticipated. Meehan gives a rueful laugh: ‘The finale of the “Harp” Quartet, for sure. We often do it as an encore, and perhaps because we have a lot of experience playing it out of context, it was surprisingly easy to access the pathos we wanted for the movement. I was surprised by Beethoven’s slow movements in general, because I think of those as the hardest. Generating momentum for the quick movements is not so tricky, but the slow movements are so profound, and sometimes you crave the feeling of having people there for you to perform to, whereas looking at the mikes can be disheartening. But the slow movements came over smoothly, and perhaps that’s a testament to the way we prepared and how Judy conducted the sessions.’

Understandably, the Calidore reserved the monumental challenges of the Grosse Fuge for one of the most recent set of sessions, though, according to Meehan, the recording process was relatively straightforward because they had lately rethought their approach to the piece, so it was fresh in the mind and under the fingers. ‘We used to embrace the utter chaos of it, but we recently found that it is much more successful when we micromanage the balance and really overdo the hierarchy of the lines so that the listener can pick out each individual voice and what’s happening at any moment. That requires an intense amount of mediation and compromise.’

There is a visceral thrill to the Grosse Fuge when it’s addressed as an onslaught, but the Calidore is one of several fine modern quartets to return a sense of timeliness to the piece, as a fugue composed in 1826, albeit one stretching the boundaries of sense and harmony. They achieve this timeliness not with the primed canvas of pure tone that is now orthodoxy for orchestral Beethoven, but through Classically defined rhythms and articulation. Choi returns to the teaching of Arnold Steinhardt, formerly first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet: ‘He talked about creating a strong and unified voice, but he said that it can only happen with four incredibly strong musicians with different things to say, so that the unified voice emerges from that strength.’

The Grosse Fuge is as challenging for its unison writing as for its obstinate dissonances, and the Calidore players have embraced the advice of another collective mentor, the Alban Berg Quartet, when it comes to practice of balance and tuning. Meehan says: ‘The outer voices play strongly and directly and the inner voices play more resonantly in a way that is not as defined, and this creates a unified, homogeneous texture. When we teach’ – and the Calidore is a faculty ensemble at the University of Delaware – ‘we tell our students that our roles as quartet players are constantly changing. We need to be very clear at any point in the music how we’re functioning. Are you harmonic, are you melodic, where is

your place in the texture? Is the texture quite closely knit? In which case you have to manage the differences in articulation and vibrato carefully. If the texture is more open, it’s more possible for everyone to play quite individually and the balance maintains itself.’

For Choi, late Beethoven is all about ‘leaning into the weird’, and she recalls another teaching experience, with young quartets in Montreal. ‘They were doing Beethoven’s First Quartet op.18 no.1, with that goofy finale, full of cascading triplets. “If it’s weird,” we had to tell them, “don’t shy away from that, because then it’s not convincing.”’ A movement like the Alla danza tedesca of op.130 never feels old, concludes Meehan, ‘and it often feels as challenging to perform as it did when we first played it, because there are endless possibilities to it.’

WORKS Beethoven Late Quartets: in E flat major op.127, in B flat major op.130 (including Grosse Fuge op.133), in C sharp minor op.131, in A minor op.132, in F major op.135