Reviews

The St. Lawrence String Quartet's Monday night concert was certainly stimulating, and played with astonishing brilliance and high-profile personality.

Presented by Dallas Chamber Music, the program included a string quartet by R. Murray Schafer, who at 75 is Canada's most eminent composer but one rarely heard south of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Mr. Schafer's 1981 Third Quartet, 25 minutes long, begins with the cellist alone onstage. Long-drawn unisons ooze into quarter-tone dissonances and back again. Long slides glance against a drone; double-stop glissandos suggest air-raid sirens.

The violist, first heard offstage, walks in, playing; the two violinists begin in the back corners of the room, then move to the stage tossing off flamboyant virtuoso licks.

The second movement is a raw, primitivist dance, the players adding vocal whoops, grunts, barks and hisses. The finale echoes the first-movement slides and quarter-tone crunches, but also strings out chantlike tunes. Finally, the first violin gets up and slowly walks out in a long decrescendo of a descending three-note motif.

It's hard to know how much of this to take seriously, but it's certainly dramatic, not least in its suggestions of electronic effects. It's hard to imagine it more stunningly performed than it was at Southern Methodist University's Caruth Auditorium.

The St. Lawrence made a Haydn G major Quartet (Op. 77, No. 1) and Beethoven's Op. 130 (with the original Grosse Fuge finale) as elaborately inflected as a very expressive face. The music alternately raised an eyebrow, or both, winked, took on sudden looks of astonishment, cast sidelong glances and nodded with gentle smiles.

But, as with most performances, the loud parts of the Grosse Fuge were overplayed. The score is full of fortissimo and accent markings, but never does it say to play crudely or out of tune.

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