Weekend Concerts in Manhattan: Dufay (Orlando Consort) and Beethoven (Artemis Quartet)

This may seem like a strange coupling, but that's concert life in Manhattan.  On Saturday evening, I attended a performance by the Orlando Consort presented by Miller Theatre of Columbia University, taking place at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square.  The concert was titled "The Birth of the Renaissance: Guillaume Dufay."  Then, on Sunday afternoon, I attended an all-Beethoven concert by the Artemis Quartet at Town Hall, presented by Peoples' Symphony Concerts.

I had a curious reaction to the Dufay concert.  The program was divided between sacred and secular works.  The sacred music worked beautifully in the resonant space of the church, the long lines casting their spell as suitably projected by the four-man vocal ensemble from England.  But the secular works were less successful due to the very qualities of the space that made the sacred music successful.  Dufay wrote music suited to the spaces in which it would be performed and the purposes for which it would be performed.  The secular works would not be performed in big, resonant church spaces, but rather in taverns, drawing rooms, or other smaller private spaces.  They were written with the intention that the words be comprehensible, and with faster moving harmonies and contrapuntal lines, which were terribly smudged and approximate-sounding in the resonant church space.  This is not to take anything away from the fine musicians, only to suggest that they should have adjusted their program to suit the space.

I first heard the Artemis Quartet play many years ago at a Peoples' Symphony Concert at Washington Irving High School.  The concert included a fantastic performance of the Ligeti String Quartet No. 1 that caused me to become infatuated with that piece.  They had already recorded it for a German label, and I had to import it from a European website.  Since then the Quartet has gone on to fame and fortune, signing with the Virgin Classics label (and some of its earlier recordings were licensed by Virgin for re-release).  They've also experienced some turnover in personnel.  I think only the first violinist and cellist remain from the original configuration.  I found their playing in Beethoven this afternoon to be very aggressive, even brash at times, driven...  This worked reasonably well for the Serioso Quartet (Op. 95) which opened the program, and very well for the Razoumovsky Quartet (Op. 59, No. 3), which closed it, but less well for the late Op. 127 Quartet.  I thought the Razoumovsky performance was really superb, about the most exciting I could imagine.  But the Op. 127 lost my attention.  The audience was so swept away by the vigorous playing in the scherzo that they applauded spontaneously at the end of it, those unfamiliar with the piece evidently thinking it was over.  The musicians seemed bemused, then went on to play the finale.  They play standing up, except for the cellist, and he plays seated on a high podium so that he is at eye-level with his standing compatriots.  My guess is that cellist Eckart Runge is in many ways the real leader of this group; he seems to set the tone most of the time, and is a very extraverted player.

Overall, an interesting musical weekend....