Hype is rarely justified. But in the case of the Dover Quartet, it is.
Four years ago the young ensemble scooped up all three prizes at the prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition. The group has since swept to international prominence, garnering a reputation as the most gifted quartet of its generation.
Listeners found out why Tuesday evening at Winona's Minnesota Beethoven Festival, with the Dovers delivering a recital of mesmerizing quality and insight.
It started with Mozart — a winsome, effortlessly elegant performance of the composer's 23rd and final string quartet. The playing was technically immaculate — exquisite balances between the four instruments, delicious tonal quality and pinpoint unanimity in accents and dynamics. Time and again, though, the Dovers impressed not by fancy fingerwork, but by tapping the expressive nuances of Mozart's music. The Andante in particular — a movement that can quickly turn sentimental — had a remarkable air of restraint and wistful resignation.
A year after he wrote it, Mozart was dead. And the Dover Quartet movingly captured a sense of what was lost, of the new, reflective vistas opening in the composer's music as the maturities of middle age beckoned.
Quartet No. 23 features on the group's all-Mozart debut CD from 2016. Next they previewed their follow-up recording, currently in production, with a performance of the String Quartet No. 3 by Polish composer Szymon Laks.
Laks was a Holocaust survivor who led the inmates' orchestra at Auschwitz. Little of that trauma is evident in the Third String Quartet, premiered just seven months after his release.
A troubled pastoralism shaded the slow movement in the Dover's reading, but it was the gamboling pizzicati of the third movement, and the warm, affable drone rhythms of the finale, which underlined the music's positive emotional tenor. Plangent solo passages by the Dover's fabulously articulate cellist Camden Shaw, and lissome phrasing from violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, particularly caught the ear.
As in the Mozart, though, it was the group's selfless teamwork that pulled the piece together, the instruments seamlessly interweaving like tapestry threads.
Beethoven's towering Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130 crowned the program after intermission. The performance emphasized the work's startling originality and sense of avant-garde adventure.
Histrionics were totally avoided. Attacks were sharp, though never slashing. The Presto scuttled nervously without becoming an incoherent jabber. And the famous Cavatina spoke directly to the heart, with no false posturing or emotional pleading. Even in the furious dueling of the "Great Fugue" finale the Dovers found clarity amid the craziness, marshaled by the superbly intelligent, fast-witted leadership of first violinist Joel Link.
The Dovers will, no doubt, find further things to say about this Everest of string quartets. For now, though, their Op. 130 is a formidable achievement which demands a CD recording.
Terry Blain writes about classical music and theater.
