Music Review: Orion String Quartet
Orion quartet closes its season with verve

Those favored artists-in- residence at IU’s Jacobs School of Music, the Orion String Quartet, made their final appearance of the season in Auer Hall Sunday afternoon another auspicious one, regaling the audience with Wheaties-energetic performances of works by Leon Kirchner, Dvorak and Mendelssohn.

The buzz is that the group will be back next year. There’s no official announcement yet, mind you, but word has it that the contractual strings which bind the ensemble to Bloomington are being re-tied. And that would be very good news on two fronts: for area audiences who’ve come to depend on these artists to add a glow to the concert scene and for IU students who’ve had the benefit of their training in master classes and other instructional comings together.

Sunday’s program ended with one: On stage were not only the Orion members (the violinist brothers Daniel and Todd Phillips, violist Steven Tenenbom and cellist Timothy Eddy), but a student foursome from the ensemble classes of IU’s Atar Arad: violinists Michael Waterman and Juliette Javaheri, violist Sheldon Person and cellist Christina Stripling.

Together, and remarkably so in terms of unity and expressiveness, they played Mendelssohn’s ultra-romantic Octet in E-Flat Major with a zest and brilliance worthy of this most amazing piece of chamber music, written miraculously when the composer was a lad of 16. They managed to produce the close-to-orchestral textures demanded for the opening Allegro and a dreamlike quiet for the Andante. They negotiated the elfin runs in the Octet’s Scherzo and the vehement climaxes asked for in its closing Presto. In every way, the reading dazzled.

Dvorak’s Opus 96 String Quartet in F Major is subtitled “American.” He wrote it while living in Spillville, Iowa, and it mimics black spirituals and strains of Native American music, even while it retains the rhythmic nuances of the composer’s own Czech background. The Orion played this tuneful exercise with expected elan and with the wonderful togetherness that marks its work.

Sunday’s concert opened with Kirchner’s String Quartet No. 1, thereby completing the Orion’s traversal during this season of the composer’s four quartets. This one, written by a young Kirchner in 1949, was heavily influenced by his teacher Schoenberg and also by Bartok, but already it contains qualities that would become his own. Though of avant garde nature, the score contains gobs of emotional sinew. In listening, one could sense what went on in the composer’s mind: feelings of agitation, of pensiveness, of mystery, each projected with intensity. The ensemble’s affinity for the music was evident; the reading surged with feverish excitement.

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The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.