United States Korngold: Calidore String Quartet (Jeffrey Myers, Ryan Meehan [violins], Jeremy Berry [viola], Estelle Choi [cello]). Zipper Hall, The Colburn School, Los Angeles, 13.11.2024. (LV)
Korngold – String Quartets No.1 in A major, Op.16; No.2 in E-flat major, Op.26; No.3 in D major, Op.34
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s three string quartets would not have made his reputation. They are each exceedingly ambitious: perhaps he was destined to be shadowed by having been named Wolfgang and then turning out to be a prodigy. Although they were composed in three different decades, the third as World War II was ending, the quartets share a yearning to find an identity in the swirl of styles that were at the composer’s command. They were really one long quartet, dominated by surging waves of late Romanticism with Schoenbergian chromatic whitecaps and two genius moments that would become hallmarks of Korngold’s movie scores.
The first moment is in the last movement of Op.16, a brief, march-like episode that shows up twice, with an immediate appeal to the ear and the emotions that Korngold’s iconic march for The Adventures of Robin Hood would encapsulate. The second was a melting two-bar harmonic sequence in the first movement of No.2 that could have been the love music for Errol Flynn’s hero and Olivia de Havilland’s Lady Marian.
It speaks to the larger genius of Hollywood that they were able to use Korngold’s particular genius just right, even if that meant indignities like Max Reinhardt’s kitschy A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Magic Fire, a Richard Wagner biopic featuring Yvonne De Carlo as Minna and Rita Gam as Cosima. And the kitsch is not dead. In 2011, the quattrocelli quartet recorded a wildly delicious arrangement of the march. Indeed, the last movement of No.2 is itself a parody of an intoxicated Viennese waltz.
When second violinist Ryan Meehan spoke briefly after the first quartet, he stressed how immensely difficult the writing is for all four instruments. In fact, both the first violinist and cellist need to be soloists and are constantly being exposed, while the second violin and viola need to be virtuosos as well, although most of what they do is under the radar. No wonder that when they take Korngold on the road in March to Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, Herbst Theatre in San Francisco and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, they will play only No.3 – and in three different programs with music by Beethoven, Schubert, Jessie Montgomery and Han Lash.
In the middle of his remarks, Meehan casually referred to Korngold’s Hollywood career beginning ‘when World War II happened’. Ah, youth!
Laurence Vittes