Tesla Quartet @ Black Mountain College Museum
56 Broadway; Asheville, NC
Feb. 22, 2018
Perhaps because Asheville, North Carolina, is such a mecca for Midwestern retirees – AARP’s was among the first magazines with national reach to “discover” and then promote Asheville as a destination in the late ’90s – the appetite for “challenging” programming when it comes to classical music is limited. One might liken the local semi-pro symphony’s six regular season seasonal programs to a Bob Evans menu (meat loaf, mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy); the local NPR station’s 2-hour afternoon show seems to draw its playlists entirely from the CBS Masterworks series; and when touring chamber ensembles do pass through town, their sets rarely broach the Romantic period, let alone the Modern one. So this concert at the Black Mountain College Museum by the Tesla Quartet – including pieces by Bartok, Ravel (piano minuets transcribed by lead violinist Russ Snyder) and Hugo Kauder – a Viennese composer who fled the Nazis and wound up teaching polyphony at BMC in the mid- ’40s – was a rare opportunity for locals to hear 20th Century music played really, really well.
For non-New York Times readers, Asheville is a small city with a few claims to literary and artistic fame and is justly proud of Black Mountain College’s heritage. From 1933 to 1957, BMC was a radical attempt to reconfigure liberal arts education (no grades, graduate whenever you felt like it…), steered by some of the era’s celebrity thinkers across many disciplines: Buckminster Fuller, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg and Allen Ginsberg were all on the faculty at one point. Ten to fifteen minutes from downtown in what might be a suburb if Asheville’s craggy topography allowed for eastward sprawl, BMC’s campus still stands, worse for wear, and has hosted a biannual outdoor roots- and world music festival for many years. More recently, a Black Mountain College Museum was established in a storefront on a relatively tourist-free block on downtown Asheville’s east side.
By far the best-known of the BMC music faculty was John Cage, who held his first “happening” at BMC. Less known, by a light year or so, was Hugo Kauder. Kauder (1888-1972) did not rate an entry in Norman Lebrecht’s Companion to 20th Century Music even though he was dead long before the book was published, nor have any reviews of his music appeared in the vast-in-scope bi-monthly Fanfare (to which I was gifted a subscription). He was prolific, producing over 300 works according to Wikipedia. His fourth string quartet was written in 1927, six years after his first, and he would go on to write a whopping 13 more. Kauder was the impetus for this show, it turns out. A member of the Hugo Kauder Society delivered an introduction in the form of a fan letter to the long-dead Kauder, and Kauder’s grandaughter, a woman in her golden years, also thanked everyone for coming.
The show began with four short madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo da Venossa (1566-1613), transcribed for string quartet (from five vocal parts) by Snyder. He told those assembled (perhaps 100 or so) that the poems whose words accompany the madrigals were profane and melancholic. I enjoyed the four pieces quite a bit, but waited too long (a week) to write this to say much about them otherwise…
The chance to hear a young, award-winning string quartet play a Bartok piece is what persuaded me to set aside my intense loathing of humanity – especially beer tourists, yuppie millennials and rich retirees, all of whom flock to Asheville like flies on an orange dog turd – and actually go downtown on a Friday night in the first place. Bartok trumps yups, in sum.
Though it didn’t come up, the Teslas are undoubtedly aware of Asheville’s other claim to 20th century art music fame — the brief stay by Bela Bartok in the winter of 1943-44. In his waning days and aware of it, Bartok worked hard while he was in Asheville – a last gasp during which he completed his third piano concerto (called “the Asheville Concerto when it is played here every now and again) for his wife Ditta to perform, worked on the viola concerto that was posthumously completed by associates, and (according to one account I read) revised his best-known late work, his Concerto for Orchestra. (You can visit and even stay in the room, which is now a bed and breakfast.)
The six string quartets Bartok left behind are of course regarded by most devotees of modern music as the equal of the Shostakovich set, which is to say the best the century produced. They are intense and intricate, full of swooping and skittering and plucking, verging on atonality for long passages, only to emerge in splashes of astounding melody. They present a challenge to players – even the most highly-rated recordings get demerits for being either a little too too serious (e.g., the Emerson Quartet’s set on Deutsche Grammophon) or a little too playful (the Tokyo Quartet’s set on ). On this evening, the Tesla took on the 3rd, also from 1927. It is by far the shortest of the six, a miniature relative to the others, but it is not a lesser work. It’s a kaleidoscopic and hard-focus 14 minutes without a slow movement. From watching the Teslas play up close – the first violinist on this piece, Michele Lie, could have elbowed me in the face had she chosen to do so – I’d say they strike the perfect balance of serious-to-playful for Bartok. Watching up close was amazing. I can still picture her fingers, like tendrils of a sea anemone in hyper-time lapse. The interplay of the foursome put me in mind of some of the best rock bands I’ve seen, and the music put me in mind of bats zinging around a lit billboard on a summer night, a billboard by my old apartment and across from a White Castle; I liked to watch whenever I could.
I am going to try to see the Tesla Quartet whenever I can. As I often say on my radio show, I have only been listening carefully to this kind of music for three years (and knew not much beforehand except the names Bartok and Shostakovich), but I know the Bartok quartets well enough to recognize awesome playing. I have three sets (the aforementioned two, plus one by the Takacs Quartet, which is also excellent), and I would buy one by the Tesla Quartet. Especially after seeing the manner in which they played the third. They electrified the crowded room.
I also thought that Bela Bartok, if his ghost might have wandered in from his Montford rooming house, would really enjoy seeing his music brought to ultravivid life in the 21st Century.
(Hoping I get to see them do this ^^^ on day.)
Following a Bartok quartet, especially a brilliantly-realized one, on a bill would be a tough slot for almost any piece of music, but the Kauder 4th Quartet was at least different enough that it did not represent a letdown by any means. While nowhere as challenging to the performers or audience, Kauder’s quartet was lyrical, playful and, if anything, a little too short. (The whole show was a little over an hour, which is just about right.) In his introduction to the piece, cellist Serafim Smigelskiy said it was a piece they had fun playing, and they had fun playing it at BMCM.
Without a heads-up (or perhaps a better knowledge of music), Kauder’s fourth string quartet would be difficult to identify as coming from an Austrian or, for that matter, a modernist. Its themes brought to mind England or Scotland – more Frank Bridge or Vaughan Williams-like in orientation than Berg or Webern. Those are, to me, exceedingly GOOD things, I should say – I enjoyed the piece enough that when I got home I downloaded a 2007 CD of Kauder’s first four string quartets on the Centaur label, very well played by the Euclid Quartet in a fine-sounding recording. The Tesla performance was just as good, for whatever that’s worth…
A pre-programmed encore was three Ravel piano minuets arranged for quartet by Snyder. Before launching into them, Snyder announced that their debut CD will be out in the fall, on either the MSR label or the British label Orchid (between which they were deciding.) It will have a Haydn quartet, the Ravel quartet they nailed at the Masonic Temple show (another piece I know well enough to vouch for), and the transcribed Ravel minuets. There might be more. My memory should qualify me for disability.
Lanky, fresh-faced and affably serious (they look like a Division III college cross country team), the future for the Tesla Quartet would seem to be a very bright one, barring disaster. I defintiely recommend checking them out: they have two upcoming shows in the region – one in Hickory on March 31 and the other in Hendersonville on April 8. In each case they’ll be playing a piece that resulted from an annual online “Call for Scores” the quartet presents on its website. (The winning piece, by an Ozark composer, uses a field recording made in Asheville, which could be cool. Could be not.)
By all means, visit their site – teslaquartet.com – for news, shows and release date; and check out some of the numerous HD videos on Youtube.
The Hugo Kauder Society, meanwhile, is a living and breathing thing, sponsoring an annual chamber music competition (which the Euclid Quartet won, incidentally) among other things, and has a website up and running, hugokauder.org. The director’s name is Karl Warner; his e-mail is karl@hugokauder.org.
Finally, in doing a read-over, I noticed the one Tesla member whose name is not mentioned above is the violist’s Edwin Kaplan. To leave it out would be an injustice. They are an awesome foursome.
Concentration Camp 