Jan. 09--Northwestern University's Winter Chamber Music Festival is virtually alone in bringing heat and light to the days starting off the new year, and Friday night at Evanston's Pick-Staiger Concert Hall brought that warmth to the fore with the start of the series' 20th season.
The Lincoln String Quartet, made up of members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, presented a program of masterworks by Franz Joseph Haydn, Dmitri Shostakovich and Johannes Brahms that satisfied by illuminating a bit more than it sizzled.
Each piece was fine-toned, precise, unforced and almost wholly faithful to the composers' directives. Hallmarks of the evening were poise and easygoing virtuosity.
Shostakovich's Third Quartet also had something else. Perhaps older listeners recalled the composer's skittishness when he came to Northwestern to accept an honorary degree more than 40 years ago. That display of nerves is everywhere in the five-movement quartet, and if other ensembles have made more of underlying violence, the Lincoln instead matter-of-factly honored the music's abrupt turn-on-a-dime quality that jerks auditors from banal jocularity to numbed beauty.
Moments of bleached-white violin tone conveyed hushed melancholy especially well in the fourth movement that Shostakovich initially titled, "Homage to the dead." And the Lincoln's evenhandedness with the kaleidoscope of moods allowed the screeching outburst in the final pages of the fifth movement to shock by finally giving vent to agony previously distracted from or suppressed.
An avoidance of overstatement also benefited Haydn's Quartet No. 61, which begins with a minor-key pathos that tempts forcing. The Lincoln effectively adopted a middle course between elegance and proto-Romantic expression. The third movement, often called the "witches' minuet," conveyed a peasantlike stomping without exaggerated roughness or unbridled wildness.
Brahms' Second Quartet abounds in directives such as "graceful," "sweetly," "light" and "in a soft tender manner." These the Lincoln observed without underlining, each sounding inevitable and natural. Lei Hou and Qing Hou switched seats for the performance, resulting in a slightly duskier tone for first violin. The level of smoothness and gentleness, however, remained pretty much the same.
The 2016 Winter Chamber Music Festival continues on Fridays and Sundays through Feb. 7 at Northwestern University's Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, 50 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston; $35-$10; 847-467-4000; events.music.northwestern.edu.
Alan Artner is a freelance critic.
