Opening and closing tempos on the Quapaw Quartet's performance Tuesday night of Franz Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" String Quartet (No. 14 in d minor) were so fast, I'd say if it was a race between Death and the Maiden, it ended in a dead heat.
The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's pre-eminent chamber ensemble -- Eric Hayward and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violins; Kate Weeks, viola (sitting in for Ryan Mooney, who's on leave); and David Gerstein, cello -- played the "hell" out of one of Schubert's best known chamber works (and one of my favorites) as part of the opening concert in the orchestra's 2014-15 River Rhapsodies Chamber Music Series at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.
The first-movement tempo was so quick I wondered whether there'd be anything left for the "Presto" fourth movement, where the tempo even speeds up for the finale. By contrast, the second movement, a theme and set of variations on the Schubert song that gives the quartet its nickname, seemed almost painfully slow at the beginning, but the movement gathered strength, if not speed, as it went along.
David Renfro, horn; Geoffrey Robson, violin; and May Tsao-Lim, piano, seemed out of phase at the beginning of another favorite, the Horn Trio in E-flat by Johannes Brahms, even beyond the early missed notes in the horn and piano and some off pitches in the violin.
The balance, however, was good, and the integration improved as the piece went on -- it was much better in the faster tempo of the rollicking second-movement Scherzo, proof that Brahms, musically at least, knew how to have a good time. The fourth-movement "hunt" was a little sloppy in spots, but the musicians cleaned it all up in time for a first-rate coda and finale.
The curtain-raiser, Three Idylls by Frank Bridge, turned out to be a surprisingly good fit thematically and harmonically for both the Brahms and Schubert works, and received a fine performance at the hands of the orchestra's Rockefeller Quartet ( Katherine Williamson and Trisha McGovern, violins; Katherine Reynolds, viola; and Daniel Cline, cello).
Metro on 10/01/2014