The Next Generation Of Classical Music

By Wendy Wipprecht

It’s very easy to find dire predictions of the future of classical music: its audience is rapidly ageing, listeners make up only about two percent of the population, and so on. Each generation of artists in any field trains and inspires the next. Classical music, it seems, must also recruit its next generation.

Newtown Friends of Music has long been working toward that end for years, encouraging ticketholders to bring children to concerts at no extra cost, bringing school musical groups to concerts, conducting an outreach program that brings performers into the classroom, and inviting small student groups to perform in the Edmond Town Hall lobby before concerts by featured artists.

The group has also, and perhaps most importantly, brought emerging artists to Newtown, so that the younger members of the audience can see people not much older than themselves performing this beautiful and difficult music.

The Escher String Quartet is not only a very young ensemble — it was founded in 2005 — but also an ensemble of young musicians. In addition, the group has been earning accolades and artists’ residencies almost from birth.

The quartet, whose members include Adam Bartnett-Hart (violin), Wu Jie (violin), Pierre Lapointe (viola) and Dane Johansen (cello), takes its name from the Dutch artist M.C. Escher. The fluid braiding of patterns and dimensions in Escher’s work is the graphic equivalent of the complex interweaving the quartet strives to achieve in music.

Performing with Escher String Quartet on Sunday, October 17, at Edmond Town Hall in Newtown, as guest artist was the young guitarist Jason Vieaux, who has an enthusiastic following and a growing reputation. Such a partnership, even though temporary, allows each partner to explore new music. Thus the program for that concert included works composed for string quartet, for solo guitar, for guitar and violin, and for guitar and strings.

The concert began with a familiar and well-loved piece, Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 64, No. 5 (“The Lark”), a work that  demonstrates the range and subtlety of the composer and the performers alike.

Haydn is a master at seeming simple, charming, and elegant, but underneath lurk complexities that endear him to musicians.  In the quartet’s first two movements, the first violinist has two very conspicuous solos: the “Lark” theme, which is so well known that the violinist has to compete with the listener’s musical memory of past performances, and also to produce the soaring sound the music calls for; in the second, he or she has to be able to play most expressively and with great dynamic range.

Mr Bartnett-Hart fulfilled all these contrary demands, and more. The other voices demonstrated precise and delicate playing at every turn. The quartet also met the very different challenge of the last movement: to remain an ensemble even at high speed and full volume.

Mr Vieaux then took the stage as a soloist, playing excerpts from Bach’s Suite in G minor, BWV 995, originally written for the lute. The guitarist offered a brief but illuminating introduction, explaining that Bach had been inspired by a lute virtuoso to compose for that instrument, and that he had been particularly intrigued by the lute’s potential to play counterpoint.

The suite consists of a prelude followed by six dances; Mr Vieaux played the Prelude, Sarabande, and Gavottes I and II. The Prelude, especially, asks the guitarist to play counterpoint at high speed, which is a much more difficult task on a guitar than on a keyboard.

It was a breathtaking performance, one that clearly laid out all the beauties of Bach’s counterpoint. A friend remarked that if he hadn’t been able to see the stage, he would have guessed that there were two guitars and four hands at work.

Other movements, of course, asked for other types of playing: the Sarabande was stately and almost meditative; the Gavottes had a faster, flowing movement and called for lightning changes in speed. At the end of this brief set of excerpts, the guitarist was greeted with whooping from the balcony, where the high school groups were seated. They had declared him a Guitar Hero.

The first piece performed jointly by Escher String Quartet and Jason Vieaux was Vivaldi’s Concerto in D major, RV 93, which was originally scored for lute, two violins, and basso continuo. This familiar work offers an opportunity for the lute (or guitar) to show off its special qualities in lengthy solos.

What was remarkable in this first example of their ensemble playing was their integration: they sounded not like a string quartet plus guitar, but like a quintet. It was very easy to imagine that they had all been playing together, on and off, just for fun, for years.

The second half of the concert was devoted to music in the Spanish tradition. Jason Vieaux performed two of his own transcriptions for guitar of two very short piano pieces by Isaac Albeniz. The first, Sevilla: Sevillanas, re-creates Seville’s regional dance, in which energetic and more stately sections alternate. The second, Torre Bermeja: Serenata, is named for the Vermilion Tower of the Alhambra in Granada. Playing these works with ease and flair, as well as with the passion we associate with Spanish guitar music, is a remarkable achievement.

Mr Vieaux and Mr Bartnett-Hart then played two excerpts from Piazzolla’s four-part composition L’Histoire du tango, scored for violin and guitar. By this point, we have learned that both Mr Vieaux and Mr Bartnett-Hart are formidable soloists; now we also know that they play beautifully together. But one question remains: Are these tangos more fun to play or to listen to?  

The final work of the elegantly designed program, Luigi Boccherini’s Quintet for Guitar and Strings in D major, G. 448, brought Escher String Quartet and Jason Vieaux together again for a piece that offers a variety of challenges, opportunities, and delights.

Young and not-so-young alike stood and cheered these superb musicians. There was so much to applaud. All five musicians onstage were gifted soloists, shining when called upon to do so, yet they could perform beautifully as ensemble players.

The program was extremely elegant, balancing familiar and less often heard works, Spanish-inflected works, and long and short pieces, to touch upon only a few categories. One lovely touch was that the last work of each half of the concert — the high point of each half — was given to the ensemble of five musicians. That seems very much in keeping with Escher Quartet’s choice of a name: the quartet points to a complex interweaving of sound as the quality it aspires to, and it can welcome other musicians, even those with as large a talent as Jason Vieaux, with open arms.

If the skill of these young players and the enthusiasm of the young musicians in the balcony that Sunday afternoon were indications of the future of classical music, we should be breathing a little more easily.