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Local composer doesn't mix well with mastersBy JOHN FLEMING © St. Petersburg Times, published March 21, 2001 ST. PETERSBURG -- The Alexander Quartet has a program called "Last Works," which includes the last quartets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Janacek. Monday, the San Francisco-based group replaced the Janacek with a quartet by St. Petersburg composer Joan Epstein for its concert at the Palladium Theater. But let's hope Epstein, a resourceful, cerebral composer who teaches at Eckerd College, gets another crack at the quartet form. Masterpieces provide tough competition for a contemporary composer, and nobody would confuse Epstein's Bond Revelations with the works that bookended it on the program, Beethoven's Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 35) and Mendelssohn's Quartet No. 6 in F minor (Op. 80). Still, it made for an instructive commentary on the malaise of modern music. The Beethoven and the Mendelssohn are nothing but pure music. The Epstein, an homage to American songwriter Carrie Jacobs-Bond, is loaded with extramusical baggage, including some scripted business in the finale where the cellist raised a glass of red wine and slapped down a wood piece on the table next to him. What the horseplay had to do with Bond's Lazy River, the song that inspired the movement, was unclear. Epstein must have had the cello on her mind when she composed the quartet, because that instrument's voice left the strongest impression in a work that took simple material and made it complicated. There was an artful, if inadvertent, cross reference between the Beethoven and Epstein quartets. Her opening movement, Oh So Long, had a repeated pattern in the violins and viola that echoed a recurring ostinato measure in the second movement of the Beethoven quartet. Along with Epstein, there was another local angle to Monday's concert, presented by Eckerd College. Alexander violist Paul Yarbrough is a Clearwater native. Other members are violinists Ge-Fang Yang and Frederick Lifsitz and cellist Sandy Wilson. The Alexander, formed in 1981, is not one of those ensembles that overwhelm the music with extroverted brilliance. The probing quality the quartet brought to the slow-moving variations in the third movement of the Beethoven was especially satisfying. The most compelling music of the night came in the last two movements of the Mendelssohn. Yang's lyrical playing in the adagio was a highlight. Quartet members remarked on the aesthetic appeal of the Palladium (praise the converted church deserves), but it was curious that the red curtain behind the stage was pulled shut to cover the pipe organ against the back wall. The curtain, installed in November, dampens the sound. Heard from a seat in the middle of the hall, the quartet sounded as if it was playing from inside a marshmallow. The Palladium is a boomy space without some kind of acoustic enhancement, but draining the hall of resonance doesn't seem to be the answer.
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