"I was pretty shy about it, but I
showed the score to my colleagues, and they said to me, ’Let’s
play it.’"
Violinist Ralph Evans, a member of the Fine Arts Quartet and
sometime composer, is discussing his String Quartet No. 1, which
he and his colleagues will perform as part of its weekend of
Bargemusic concerts Nov. 22-25.
Evans – talking by phone with GO Brooklyn from Atlanta, a stop
on the Quartet’s current U.S. tour – is typically modest about
his first quartet, which was actually begun many years earlier
by a then 13-year-old fledging composer.
"When I was younger, I was very interested in composing,"
Evans says. "When I was 13, I entered a competition and
submitted two movements of what I hoped would become a much larger
piece. They ended up as the second and third movements of this
quartet, and both movements won the top prizes!" But even
with such instant notoriety, Evans was far more adept at performing.
"I stopped composing after that," he admits. "But
29 years later, I took out my original sketches for the first
movement of the quartet, and ended up writing it all out. Growing
up in the heyday of serialism in the ’60s, I was very impressed
with that type of music in an academic sort of way, but I never
enjoyed listening to it too much. It was too dry and often boring.
My challenge was to write something more accessible but that
was also of intellectual interest, something tuneful but not
shallow."
Premiered in 1995, Evans’ first quartet is about 12 minutes long;
its spiky but tonal-based string writing provides a fresh-sounding
introduction to the remainder of the Fine Arts Quartet’s second
program (Nov. 23 and Nov. 25), which also includes the Hungarian
composer Ernst Dohnanyi’s String Quartet No. 2 and Felix Mendelssohn’s
B-flat Major String Quintet, the latter with guest violist Toby
Hoffman, who also coordinated these concerts.
The Fine Arts Quartet’s other program (Nov. 22 and Nov. 24, also
with violist Hoffman) consists of Mendelssohn’s other quintet
(in A Major) and the only string quintet by a composer most people
associate with long, often bombastic music: Austria’s Anton Bruckner.
But Evans doesn’t bother to separate the Bruckner who wrote (his
detractors might say overwrote) nine huge blocks of granite called
his symphonies and the Bruckner who penned this mighty chamber
work.
"Bruckner actually wrote very little chamber music,"
Evans admits. "He bloomed very late – his lone quartet is
what you’d call a student work, even though he wrote it in his
late 20s, and it’s almost classical-sounding, which isn’t usual
for Bruckner. The quintet however, which we’re playing, is a
masterpiece – a fantastic piece, very complicated, even symphonic
in scope. And the slow movement is quite justly famous – it’s
really beautiful."
Founded in 1946, the Fine Arts Quartet hasn’t seen many changes
in its illustrious history – in fact, Evans is just its second
first violinist, having replaced the original lead bower, Leonard
Sorkin, in 1982. Even then, Evans isn’t the longest-standing
member, an honor that belongs to the group’s cellist Wolfgang
Laufer, who joined in the late 1970s. (Second violinist Efim
Boico and violist Yuri Gandelsman complete the current lineup.)
Even in these economically squeezed times, particularly for the
classical music world, the Fine Arts Quartet has been able to
keep up a reasonably busy recording schedule, according to Evans.
"We just recorded the cycle of the six Mozart string quintets,"
the violinist says, which the group played for the first time
on a recent visit to the Beijing Music Festival in China. "What
makes this Mozart recording so interesting technically is that
it’s one of the first to use the new medium, Sony’s Super Audio
format. We’ll have to see what happens [in the fight between
Super Audio and the rival format, DVD Audio]." The Fine
Arts Quartet’s recording of Mozart’s String Quintets will soon
be available on the Lyrinx label.
As with most musicians who come to Bargemusic, Evans can’t wait
to perform in Brooklyn’s own jewel-like setting for chamber music.
"I used to live in New York years ago, before joining the
quartet," Evans says. "But I’ve never played Bargemusic
before, and I’m really looking forward to it."
The Fine Arts Quartet performs Mendelssohn
and Bruckner Nov. 22 and Nov. 24, and Evans, Dohnanyi and Mendelssohn
Nov. 23 and Nov. 25 at Bargemusic at Fulton Ferry Landing. Thursday,
Friday and Saturday concerts begin at 7:30 pm; Sundays begin
at 4 pm. For tickets, call (718) 624-2083. Tickets are $30, $25
for seniors 65 and older and $15 for students. For information
about each day’s program, go to the Web site at www.bargemusic.org.
