Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Catching up 2: the heavens open on Grant Park's stirring 'A Child of Our Time'

Here is my July 26 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Friday July 23, 2010 Grant Park Music Festival concert with the Grant Park Chorus and Orchestra and soloists conducted by Christopher Bell in Michael Tippett's oratorio, A Child of Our Time.  The free Festival continues through August 21.

Conductor Bell carries Grant Park musicians through downpour

Wacky weather can't diminish near-perfect performance of 'A Child of Our Time'

 

BY ANDREW PATNER

The heavy rainstorm that rushed through Chicago on Friday evening was certainly strangely timed.  While warnings that it had appeared quite suddenly after a supremely hot and dry day kept some away from the outdoor concert of the Grant Park Music Festival, a healthy crowd had arrived by 6:30.  Then, just as Grant Park Chorus director Christopher Bell was launching Michael Tippet's hourlong oratorio, A Child of Our Time, the heavens opened and the crowd seemed to vanish almost instantly both from the Millennium Park lawn and two-thirds of the seats in the Pritzker Pavilion.

Astonishingly, Bell and his forces -- a chorus of 175 or so, full orchestra, and four major vocal soloists -- kept going along.  Those who stayed seemed spellbound equally by the alternately powerful and hypnotic work and by the musicians' imperviousness to distraction.

[Christopher Bell]

While Saturday night's repeat performance was reported to have gone on with a hitch or raindrop, I and others I spoke with Friday were glad that we had shared this strange experience of being serenaded in the midst of a weather emergency with a work that tries to combine the story of man's inhumanity to man, the saving grace of love, Jungian psychology, odd declamations, and Negro spirituals into some sort of a whole.

Tippett (1905-1988) was both a late bloomer and a long-lived British composer.  An eccentric, socially conscious, pacifistic, openly gay man, Tippett somehow also had a force of will and a work ethic that made him a composer even though he never really mastered the elements of the art and never really had a full voice of his own.  A Child of Our Time was his breakthrough work, begun in 1939 and premiered in 1944.  (Tippett was jailed for a time during World War II as a conscientious objector.)

Inspired by the story of Herschel Grynszpan, the teenage Polish Jewish refugee who shot and killed a German officer in Paris, used by the Nazis as a pretext for 1938's Kristallnacht which launched the Holocaust, Tippett tries to weave an abstract version of this story with his own psychological views of light, shadow, and "the other."  With an idea of somehow following models of Handel's oratorios and Bach's passions, Tippett found his key by incorporating five Negro spirituals as great choral set pieces.

British conductors and programmers love Tippet, and this is one piece of his that somehow works when that love is married to great skill as it was when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed it in 2005 with Andrew Davis and as Bell and his colleagues did here.  John Relyea was the stern, dark-voiced bass narrator, tenor Garrett Sorenson the plaintive "Child," mezzo Anita Krause the narrator's female counterpart, and Chicago's own soprano Jonita Lattimore the inspirational voice of both the Mother and of all mothers.  At work's end, we were wet, but moved, and somehow even comforted.

Catching up 1: Midori is a dream in July at Ravinia's Martin Theatre

Here is my July 21 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Monday July 19, 2010 recital by violinist Midori with pianist Özgür Aydin at Ravinia's Martin Theatre.

Midori's mastery on full view here

REVIEW | Violinist plays like a dream

BY ANDREW PATNER

As hard as it might seem to envision, the former child violin phenomenon Midori has become in many ways an even more phenomenal adult.

Famously coming to worldwide attention at age 11 with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic, the Japanese-born musician also famously left the renowned Juilliard teacher Dorothy DeLay four years later at just 15 to choose "freedom, with risks, over safety."  Her career has never skipped a beat since.

[Violinist Midori performed July 19 at Ravinia's Martin Theatre with pianist Özgür Aydin.]

And even as she delves deep into classic, modern, contemporary, and neglected repertoire, she devotes the bulk of her life to education and service.  In recent years she has earned both bachelor's and master's degrees -- in psychology and gender studies -- from New York University, all the while chairing the strings department at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, where she also holds the Jascha Heifetz Chair.

She has founded and directs no fewer than four major not-for-profit programs, ranging from one that brings music to the disadvantaged and abused in such remote places as Mongolia and Laos to her commitment to play concerts and recitals in smaller cities, from Covington, Louisiana, to Fargo, North Dakota.  Even when she is in the Chicago area, she always visits the Merit School of Music downtown.  This week she spent Sunday working with two advanced scholarship students there.  Last season she chose Elgin as the site for one of her weeklong Orchestra Residency Programs.

And, yes, she still plays like a dream -- a serious dream, no doubt.  But she is both totally focused and otherworldly onstage.  Monday night before a large Martin Theatre audience at Ravinia, with the fine young Turkish-American collaborative pianist Özgür Aydin, she bracketed the 19th century with masterworks of the young Beethoven and the mature Brahms and played mystical pieces from the early 20th century by Ernest Bloch and Karol Szymanowski.

The Bloch Second Sonata, "Poème mystique" (1924), and the Szymanowski "Mythes" (1916) were surely new to most listeners and, with the exception of the first of the three Szymanowski sections, were having their first Ravinia performances.  Although separated by the intermission, these pieces spoke a parallel language of harmonies and melodies unmoored by tradition but touched by folk traditions and a Debussyian sense of what antique Greek music might have sounded like.

The Beethoven A Minor Fourth Sonata, Op. 23, had moments where Midori and Aydin seemed to be settling in with each other and the hall.  But the closing Brahms D minor Third Sonata, Op. 108, was on fire and intriguingly informed by the ethereal pieces that preceded it.  An encore of a Henryk Wieniawski "Souvenir of Moscow" showed how Midori, at 38, can fill even a showpiece with human warmth and intelligence.  What a life she is leading.

Grant Park Music Festival: Xian Zhang in music of Chen Yi, Prokofiev, and Sibelius

Here is my Saturday July 10 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review  of the Friday July 9, 2010 Grant Park Music Festival concert with guest conductor Xian Zhang leading the Grant Park Orchestra at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park downtown. 

Zhang sharp with buoyant music

BY ANDREW PATNER

The program repeats Saturday July 10 at 7:30 p.m.  Grant Park concerts are always free.

RECOMMENDED

It's been a busy week at the Grant Park Music Festival.

Tuesday and Thursday nights brought a very successful indoor chorus-only program of French music.  Wednesday night held a complex program of classical compositions from Latin America along with an extensive theatrical narration and a mid-performance rainstorm.

[Guest conductor Xian Zhang ]

Friday evening, though, was more of what people both hope for and expect when they visit the immensely popular downtown free festival: a beautiful night with a jaunty program of attractive pieces both known and unknown.  The dynamic young Chinese conductor Xian Zhang on the podium meant that things moved quickly and with precision and excitement as well.

Zhang, who turns 37 this year, was trained in China by a teacher, also a woman, who had herself studied with a woman conducting-teacher -- an unusual resume in this male-dominated profession.  After five years as assistant and associate conductor with the New York Philharmonic, Zhang, a small spitfire who wears sharp all-black suits, just completed her first season as music director of the Verdi Symphonic Orchestra in Milan.  There must be stories there, as women and Asians are extremely rare in leadership positions in Italy.

You could see, as in her other Chicago appearances, why many musicians enjoy working with her.  She moves a great deal, but her motions are clear and tied to the score.  She is deeply focused and also clearly loves what she does.

Zhang likes to open her concerts with a rare contemporary or modern piece. Here it was the 1993-94 eight-minute Ge Xu (Antiphony) by another Chinese woman based in the U.S., the Canton native Chen Yi, 20 years Zhang's senior, whose career was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution.  Based in Kansas City where she is also a popular professor at University of Missouri Conservatory of Music, Chen's music is rooted in Chinese and modern American traditions and is almost always catchy and attractive. Ge Xu is inspired by festival music of the minority Zhuang people in southern China and matched its festive purpose.

Prokofiev’s 1919 suite from his opera The Love for Three Oranges, which had its world première in Chicago in 1921, is always a good time with the “March” section later adopted for the theme to both the radio and television versions of The FBI.  (The number of people who recall this seems to be diminishing with time.)  The much-loved D Major Second Symphony of Sibelius (1900-2), was perhaps pushed too briskly, but still served as a showcase for the excellence of the Grant Park Orchestra including the extended parts for strings, horns, brass, and percussion. 

Grant Park and Goodman Theatre present torrent of words and music amid the same of rain

Here is my Friday July 9 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday July 7, 2010 Grant Park Music Festival-Goodman Theatre Latino Theatre Festival program Memory of Fire (Memoria del fuego), saluting Mexican history.

 
Mexican history plays out somewhat awkwardly in Grant Park concert

Goodman Theatre is co-producer

BY ANDREW PATNER

There was a lot going on in the complex torrent of events of the decade-long Mexican War of Independence, ignited in 1810, and the ten or ore years of the Mexican Revolution, which began a century later.

There was a lot going on, too, in the Grant Park Music Festival's salute Wednesday night to the combined bicentennial and centennial of those towering events in Mexico's history.  Director Henry Godinez (above, right) from the Goodman Theatre attempted to select from these events -- and earlier, pan-Latin ones -- and squeeze them all into an evening-length theatrical narration for five area actors combined with orchestral excerpts from five different Latin nations.

And there was a lot going on at the park itself, as rain first teased the medium-sized crowd and then started to fall hard with additional rivulets coming down on concertgoers from the metallic curls of Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion.

Ushers had been instructed not to let patrons move to empty seats "while music is playing," which meant that the very people brave enough to try waiting out the rain were forced to stand in the aisles getting soaked. Memo to Grant Park administrators: When it rains, let people move forward in the seating area.

Godinez, curator of the Goodman's annual Latino Theatre Festival, worked with colleague Jessica Mills and undergraduate students at Northwestern University to mine Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's massive, swirling 1982-86 three-volume Memoria del Fuego (English translation Memory of Fire, 1985-88) for threads of regional stories about slavery, subjugation of native peoples, the rise to power of the Roman Catholic Church, the mixed oppression and adoration of women, and the continuous cycle of revolt and setback for the poor.

Peruvian-born guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya (above, left), music director of the Fort Worth (Texas) Symphony Orchestra, pulled together accompanying works from major 20th century figures such as Mexico's Silvestre Revueltas, Argentina's Alberto Ginastera, Colombia's Adolfo Mejía and Chile's Enrique Soro, as well as from three rising composers born in the 1970s: Arturo Rodríguez of Mexico, the Finnish-trained Peruvian Jimmy López (whose work has been played at Orchestra Hall) and another Chilean, the politically focused Sebastian Errázuriz.

If this sounds like too much to take in, it usually was, despite beautiful playing by the Grant Park Orchestra and sharp and idiomatic musical leadership from Harth-Bedoya.  Ginastera and Revueltas are beloved pioneers, and López, 32, is one of the most interesting young composers anywhere today.  But it was never clear when one piece began and one ended, and whether we were hearing excerpts or whole pieces.

At other times, hugely intriguing works such as Errázuriz's 2003 "La Caravana" were played under confusing narration -- in this case an excerpt from Galeano about a breakaway revolutionary movement of black slaves -- in 17th century Brazil!

Yes, this history is greatly important, and even Galeano's massive magic-realist opus can't contain it all.  But for a concert, a sharper focus on the music and a better sense of organization would have made these points more clearly, and the evening more coherent, with or without a rainstorm.

Grant Park Chorus in Christopher Bell-wether performance of French a cappella program

Here is my Wednesday July 7 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Tuesday July 6, 2010 Grant Park Chorus program at the Grant Park Music Festival.  The concert was repeated on Thursday July 8, apologies for technical problems that prevented the review from being posted earlier.

A Bell-wether performance, courtesy of conductor and chorus

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

While Ravinia has essentially jettisoned the Chicago Symphony Chorus again this summer, the Grant Park Music Festival is using another of the city's three great professional choruses throughout the season.  (Lyric Opera's is the other for those doing classical pub quizzes.)

This week, Taste of Chicago makes possible an annual indoor unaccompanied program at the Harris Theater by the Grant Park Chorus and its gifted and ever-upbeat, Belfast, Northern Ireland-born director Christopher Bell.  This year's entry, heard Tuesday evening and to be repeated Thursday, is all French and ranges from the near-contemporary back to the Renaissance in a sensual whirlwind that lasts exactly an hour without a break but with a brilliant encore.

With diction and other additional coaching from Chicago-area perfectionist Richard Boldrey, the chorus moved without a hitch from sacred texts (some in Latin) to torrents of (intentional) nonsense to intimate love poems and even some early 16th century "adult content."  Bell saw to it that musical matches were exquisite and idiomatic; his always wacky (a good wacky) stage introductions both allowed the choristers a few seconds to breathe between numbers and gave the large audience things to listen for in overwhelmingly unfamiliar repertoire.

The opening fin-de-siècle Two Choruses, Op. 68, by Camille Saint-Saëns were real finds.  Beautiful paeans to nature and the artist's relation to it (the composer wrote the poems himself), they allowed Bell to show off his nine years of stellar work with this group.  The chorus displayed a grasp of the works' full dynamic range, and Bell quipped: "It's great fun to sing so quietly when the score is marked ppp'or pppp.' We know loud.  We know fortissimos.  We usually have to sing behind an orchestra!"  The application of this control to match the mood and language of each work and passage inspired pin-drop attention from the large audience.

Sacred pieces from 1960 by Maurice Duruflé left me cold with their lack of originality, but Olivier Messiaen's 1937 "O sacrum convivium" made you wonder why the organ and modern master didn't write more for chorus.  Whatever one's own posture toward religion, Messiaen brought his mystical Catholicism to idiosyncratic life here with his haunting harmonies and melodic lines.

The same question can be asked of a great secular Frenchman, Debussy.  His three settings of witty 15th century texts by Charles d'Orléans are too rarely heard.  Alto Sarah Ponder was the deeply expressive soloist in the middle work.

Identified with delight, settings by Poulenc and Ravel did not disappoint, even if the Poulenc works were four unseasonal Christmas settings.  Susan Nelson was the characterful soprano soloist in Ravel's "Trois beaux oiseaux de Paradis."  Two settings by Pierre Passereau closed the program with humor and intimacy.

Bell also scored a point on a too-common occurrence of audience rudeness.  After someone's electronic ringer went off at the end of a selection, Bell looked toward the offender as if he were watching the World Cup football pitch: "That was nice with the 'phone.  Well done."

Lyric Opera of Chicago's Mason to retire in spring 2012: a lifetime with the company

Here is the full version of my Wednesday July 7, 2010 Chicago Sun-Times story on William (Bill) Mason's announcement that he will retire as head of Lyric Opera of Chicago in two years time.  We'll be visiting Mason's career at Lyric in more detail in the paper in the coming season.

Lyric's longtime GM to yield reins

Leaving in 2012 | Mason to aid search for successor

BY ANDREW PATNER

William Mason, only the third manager of the Lyric Opera of Chicago in its 54-year history, has announced that he will step down as general director of the company in the spring of  2012.

Except for brief periods in the 1970s, Mason, like his predecessors Carol Fox and Ardis Krainik, spent his entire adult career with Lyric, in his case more than 40 years. He had also been a chorister and a boy soprano soloist with the company in its first three seasons in the 1950s.  Mason, who will be 70 at the end of the 2011-12 season, became general director following Krainik’s death in 1997, having long been her number two on the artistic and production side.

"I think two years from now will be the right time to turn the reins over to a new general director," Mason said in a statement, "and I look forward to working with the board [of directors] on finding a successor to lead this great company."

Never one for ceremony or grand statements, Mason emphasized that he will remain fully active with the company over the next two years.  The 2011-12 is essentially in place and will be announced in January 2011, he said, and planning is ongoing through the 2014-14 season as it must be in today’s international opera world.

A native Chicagoan who attended O’Keeffe Elementary School on the South Side, Senn High School on the North Side, and Roosevelt University downtown, Mason very much followed Krainik’s emphasis on fiscal stability as well as artistic aspirations. As Krainik did in the 1980s and 1990s following the sometimes reckless spending of the Fox era, Mason always worked closely with his board of the city’s top business leaders to raise money and control costs under a structure where the general director holds only the title of chief operating officer and an attorney or business figure is president and CEO of the opera company.

He often turned to others for artistic leadership in areas outside of the Italian repertoire that was always closest to his heart and which he had learned at the elbow of his mentor, one of Lyric’s longtime artistic chiefs, the late Pino Donati. He kept Krainik’s artistic adviser, New York agent Matthew A. Epstein, after her death, and later elevated him to artistic director before dismissing him in a falling out over contemporary repertoire. Mason paid tribute to Epstein in his statement although he curtailed, for economic reasons he said at the time, much of Krainik and Epstein’s adventurous programming.

Mason also saw Lyric’s radio broadcasts over Chicago’s WFMT Radio Network, end in 2001 in a pay dispute with the Lyric Orchestra’s union musicians and resume again beginning in 2006.

And Mason hired Andrew Davis as music director to succeed podium fixture Bruno Bartoletti in 2000.  Mason gave Davis his head, allowing him to lead Verdi and Puccini as well as the German, British, and Czech works for which he was known.

By the time of his retirement, the Lyric statement said, Mason will have produced more than 120 productions including more than 40 new ones.  

Lyric president and CEO Richard P. Kiphart said a search committee for a successor, led by board vice-president Kenneth G. Pigott, had already started its work.

CSO Wagner night at Ravinia: great orchestra and soprano in an empty forest

Here is my Friday July 2 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday  June 30, 2010  Chicago Symphony Orchestra all-Wagner Ring excerpts concert at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, with James Conlon conducting, soprano Christine Brewer, and tenor John Treleaven. 

 Great orchestra in an empty forest

CSO, Brewer dazzle small but appreciative gathering on Wagner night

BY ANDREW PATNER

Talk about a two-handed evening. 

Wednesday night offered a rare chance to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra onstage in an all-Wagner evening at Ravinia, something hearkening back to the golden era there of James Levine, as well as an opportunity to hear one of our finest Wagner sopranos, American-born Christine Brewer.  The stalwart Cornish tenor John Treleaven was also on hand to sing Siegfried to Brewer's Brünnhilde.  The night was beautiful.  The moon was out.  The air was just right.

But where were the people?

As the Ravinia administration continues its campaign to marginalize a great orchestra that was once its very reason for being, they could see the results of their handiwork all around them: a half-empty Pavilion and an essentially empty lawn on the same night that the Grant Park Music Festival drew 10,000 people to its Polish repertoire program -- and at the North Shore venue where, under Levine, you'd want to get your Pavilion tickets or your patch of lawn early for such a program.

The evidence of neglect is staggering: Posters and marketing materials all over the city that barely refer to the CSO or other classical concerts. A second-rate orchestral conductor who has no following here, elsewhere, or among the players.  A former music director, also second-rate, who won't go away.  The ditching of the Chicago Symphony Chorus.  An "opening night" for the CSO on Monday, weeks into the Ravinia season, and featuring a reduced orchestra as mere accompaniment to two piano showpieces (with the CSO players even rushed off the stage after playing the national anthem so that the soloist could perform two piano pieces alone onstage).

And with the exception of this Wagner night and two Mozart operas with fine casts to be presented in the intimate Martin Theatre in August, poor and obvious programming that also pushed the contractual pops concert limit so far that a "video game symphony" evening had to be canceled to make way for more Sondheim and Annie Get Your Gun.  If the CSO's own management tried these tactics itself, it could empty Orchestra Hall, too.

After Ravinia's board chair took the stage Monday night to emphasize that the board really, really does love the CSO, one veteran orchestra player posted on the Internet, "As the number of concerts we play at our summer 'home' has dwindled over the years, the amount of times I've heard us referred to as the 'Crown Jewel' of the festival has gone up exponentially -- the sort of endearments a guy who wants to continually step out on his wife but is fearful of having her leave him might offer up."

Be all this as it sadly is, the orchestra rose to the occasion Wednesday.  Music director James Conlon is better in operatic repertoire than he is in the symphonic.  Still, despite having just completed not one but three complete Ring cycles in Los Angeles, there was not a sense that this is a work of limitless depth and harmonic invention.

Pacing, though, he had, and a clear love of his wonderful singers.  With strings, brass, and winds all excelling (and despite the many substitute and supplementary players in the latter sections) in the vocal excerpts as well as the two orchestral showpieces, "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey" and "Siegfried's Funeral Music," the two soloists seemed additionally empowered.

Brewer's presence guaranteed great work in both the final scene of Siegfried and the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung -- and how many singers could carry off both of these in an evening and at such a uniformly high level?  Equally intelligent as a singer and an interpreter, Brewer always knows both where she and her character are going.  Hitting her highest notes without effort or show, dipping deep into the alto range when called for, she was musical, dramatic, lyrical, and thrilling at all times.  Treleaven, who just came off the Los Angeles Rings, was the real surprise, matching Brewer in warmth and spirit and not merely showing earnestness and stamina.

Is it too much to hope that the Ravinia board will come to its senses, recognize the jewel that exists here, and return the focus of the festival to the CSO, great conductors, and the best classical music?  We don't need a tax-exempt showcase for the BoDeans, the B-52s, "The Music of ABBA" and Earth, Wind & Fire.

Juilliard at a crossroads: at Ravinia quartet shows what might have been

Here is the full version of my Thursday July 1 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Tuesday  June 29, 2010 Juilliard String Quartet performance at the Martin Theatre of the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois. 

Juilliard Quartet shows what might have been

New first violin Eanet to be leaving group after only a few months

BY ANDREW PATNER

From its founding at the request of the Juilliard School of Music’s composer-president William Schuman  almost 65 years ago, the Juilliard String Quartet has been the gold standard of American chamber ensembles for many listeners. Its founding first violinist, Robert Mann, held his chair for more than half a century and was one of the few chamber artists to attain near-celebrity status in the musical and wider worlds.

The group has handled departures of its members, due to illness or changed interests, superbly, with the seven members who took seats since the first roster changes in the 1950s being uniformly excellent musicians.  They each also fit fully into the ensemble’s signature strong sound, tough posture, and advocacy of Modernist composers as well as the standard repertoire.  Samuel Rhodes has been the Juilliard’s violist since 1969, Joel Krosnick the cellist since 1974.  Until this season, second violinist Ronald Copes with 13 years of service was the newcomer

So when University of Chicago alum Joel Smirnoff, former second violin and then Mann’s successor in the first violin chair, took the presidency of the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2008, all eyes were on the Juilliard as it searched for only the third lead player in its history.  After extensive auditions, the group chose Nick Eanet, co-concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and former first violin in the Mendelssohn String Quartet.  But Eanet's integration into the tight unity of the group was delayed by a broken wrist from an inline skating accident.

[The Juilliard String Quartet: Nick Eanet (from left), Ronald Copes, Joel Krosnick, and Samuel Rhodes. ]

Tuesday, just a few months after the new lineup gave its first official New York concert, the quartet announced that Eanet would be leaving the group after this season, due to "an acute digestive ailment" that would limit his ability to keep up a rigorous touring schedule.

Tuesday night at Ravinia's Martin Theatre, the Chicago area was host to the Juilliard's first performance following this surprise announcement.  Perhaps this development, and its disclosure, accounted for some shaky intonation and a lack of blend at times in the fascinating Schumann A Major Quartet, Op. 41, No. 3, the type of unconventional work that is normally the Juilliard's bread and butter. Still, the middle two movements demonstrated the expected Juilliard intellectual digging and presentation.

Mario Davidovsky's 1998 Fifth Quartet, "Dank an Opus 132," is a deep exploration of the slow movement in Beethoven's great A Major quartet.  In just 12 minutes, the Argentinean-American takes apart Beethoven's harmonies and reassembles them in raw and jagged ways.  It's not so different from the composer's earlier works, and there was still an air of distraction in the playing.

I would never have predicted that a Mendelssohn quartet would be the highlight of a Juilliard program, but the D Major, Op. 44, No. 1, especially in its last two movements, found the group riding high and playing beautifully, as a collective and as individuals.

Eanet has a wonderful smooth and warm sound that both connects and contrasts attractively with the styles of his colleagues.  The encore of the Menuetto from Schubert's A Minor "Rosamunde" Quartet, D. 804, gave an even better sense of what a wonderful unit this foursome could have become.

What do the three senior members of the group do now?  New auditions, selection, and waiting for an invitee to clear his or her calendar to join them could take another couple of years and Rhodes and Krosnick might be ready to retire by then.  Their contemporaries of the Guarneri Quartet, with a very different. hardly-changing personnel tradition, chose to disband and retire recently after 45 years.  Or perhaps they could take a page from William Schuman and Bobby Mann and found and mentor a New Juilliard String Quartet.  Whatever path its players choose, this is a great and historic ensemble at a crossroads.