Mark Gresham | 22 OCT 2020
On Sunday afternoon, the Peachtree String Quartet (violinists Christopher Pulgram and Sissi Yuqing Zhang, violist Yang-Yoon Kim and cellist Thomas Carpenter) traveled to Athens, Georgia, where they performed an hour-long program of movements drawn from four of Beethoven’s string quartets for a limited audience of 15 gathered in Hodgson Hall at the University of Georgia Performing Arts Center. The concert was also live-streamed ticket buyers at home as part of Studio HH, the UGA Presents fall season of virtual programming. Program notes were read in between the four pieces by David Fung, UGA professor of piano.
It was the first public performance hosted by the Center since it was closed in March due to the coronavirus pandemic. Sunday’s concert marked a major turning point for the Center in its cautious process of reintroducing live performances to the UGA campus and community.
Although UGA Presents typically offers over three dozen performances by professional touring artists in a season, but the global music touring industry brought to a complete halt last spring due to travel and safety restrictions. For this fall, the UGA PAC elected to engage local area musicians to perform a small number of live events with very limited audience in Hodgson Hall, which has a capacity to seat an audience of 1,100.
The live stream was a well-made endeavor with quick but silky smooth cross fades in the switching between multiple cameras. Quite similar in visual character to that of a recent performance by the Vega Quartet streamed from Emerson Hall at Emory University’s Schwartz Center, this video presentation from Hodgson Hall offered images with a rich color and good contrast that comes from the advantages of controlled stage lighting, versus general illumination of large room.
It also featured an excellent, well-balanced audio that was less “hot” than the Vega concerts, though exhibiting a full-bodied warmth and presence. The Peachtree Quartet was visibly close-mic’d versus the Vega Quartet’s use of overhead mics out of camera view. The sonics of Hodgson Hall and the audio setup in Sunday’s concert came across as friendly to all of the instruments, but seemed to have a special affinity for the color and musical detail in the sound delivered by Carpenter’s cello.
PSQ opened the program with the first movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 1 in F major (Op. 18 No.1) followed by the third movement of his String Quartet No. 5 in A major (Op. 18 No. 5) – the latter a Pastorale that is a set of variations with several different tempi that substitutes well for the usual slow movement of a string quartet. These were examples of Beethoven’s earliest quartets, when he was finding his own voice in the genre.
The program then advanced naturally into the composer’s “heroic” middle period with the first movement of the String Quartet No. 10 in B-flat major (Op. 74), nicknamed “Harp” due to its extensive use of pizzicato. PSQ had previously performed the entire “Harp” Quartet as the closer for its January 2020 concert, their last season concert before the pandemic shutdown came along.
To conclude the concert, the group played the slow (and long) third movement from the late-period String Quartet No. 15 in A minor (Op. 132). Alternating increasingly complex sections in F Lydian mode with more hopeful, faster sections in D major. The movement ended quietly, and the Lydian mode left the impression that all was not finished, that something was still to come – which of course would be the case when all four movements of the Quartet are played. As it was, in this context, the final pianissimo notes of the concert hung hauntingly in the air, to surprisingly good effect.
The fact of having an in-person audience to engage with musically, however small, surely must have had positive impact on the musicians’ performance. Even viewed through a digital screen, it at least seemed so.
The next opportunity to hear the Peachtree String Quartet online will be tonight at 8:00pm ET, as part of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s next virtual subscription concert, in which they will perform Mozart’s Quartet in C major, K. 465 (nicknamed the “Dissonance” Quartet). All PSQ members are members of the ASO, so it is a natural fit. The ticketed virtual concert will be available online for 72 hours. Visit atlantasymphony.org for more information about that virtual concert and ticketing. ■
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