Jaunty Bay Area quartet fills art museum
Pianist Sarah Cahill and the Berkeley Art Museum, hosts of the First Friday L@TE series, brought the Del Sol String Quartet to the museum’s ground floor on Oct 1. The concrete gallery, a cubist’s paradise, magnified the sound with echoes that reverberated up through the cantilevered levels.
This series of unusual concerts blends new and traditional sounds in an artistic setting, with cheap beer adding to the informality. And rather than rows of chairs, which may limit one to more captive receptivity, the gallery held a massive plywood artform which undulated across the space. The audience molded themselves to hummocks or perched like penguins on a rookery.
A flotilla of shoes lapped the shores of the 1500 square foot sculpture, designed by East Bay architect Thom Faulders. Though engaging, it was pretty uncomfortable, but that was soon forgotten as cellist Kathryn Bates Williams began plucking pairs of notes. Fifths and the intervals of open strings enclosed and enlarged us with echoes. The violins and viola slowly paced into her space, eliciting high birdcalls with tremulous bowing.
They launched into their main program with Kui Dong’s Spring (2006), an invocation to the season in fast notes that evolved from single threads into cacophony, precessing through flocks of birds and back into a single Eastern chord.
It became clear that Del Sol’s strength lay in the clarity of their individual sounds. First violinist Kate Stenberg is supple with clean traceries at the top, but has a meaty bottom. She has been featured with pianists Sarah Cahill and Eva-Maria Zimmerman in Other Minds’ New Music Séance series, and has long been an advocate for the experimental.
Violinist Rick Shinozaki brought agility and rich slides, and his even-handed skills made him adroit in every combination. Founder and violist Charlton Lee has an exceptionally rich sound, shifting the tonal center of the quartet down. Rather than the supportive role to which a viola is often relegated, Lee claims a masterly sonority.
This was most evident in Lou Harrison’s String Quartet Set (1979), which followed. There, viola and cello opened with a sumptuous walking meditation, partaking equally of ancient modal chant and Irish lament. And that was the other surprise—the almost wanton richness and assuredness of cellist Kathryn Bates Williams, a recent addition to the quartet and a founding member of New Spectrum Ensemble.
Harrison’s globe trotting composition brought us melancholy viola lines, a Baroque Rondeau, and Arabic scales, with Williams slapping her cello and striking the strings under the bridge with a short stick.
They moved into an Argentine lyricism with Osvaldo Golijov’s lovely Tenebrae (2003). This piece, prefaced with a quasi-meditation, held the deepness and disquiet of a forest. The canvas of sound built until heavier cello strokes forced the reversal of subject and ground. And then faded away, as a daydream of a forest will.
Stretching their material and waking us from trance, they played Fast Blue Village 2 (2007) by Elena Kats-Chernin, a great energetic frolic, full of tango tempos and Uzbek scales.
And then encored with an excerpt of an adaptation of Astor Piazolla’s Libertango. Viola growled and violins taunted, propelled by a jaunty cello bass line.
The next “First Friday” at the Berkeley Art Museum will be Nov 5 at 7:30. The UC Chamber Chorus joins the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio in a performance of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, described as a “meditative masterpiece.”
The Del Sol Quartet can be heard with new programs in upcoming performances: Friday Nov 5 at 8 p.m. at the SF Conservatory and Saturday Nov 13 at 8 p.m. at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
—Adam Broner
This article originally appeared in the Piedmont Post. Del Sol Quartet members cellist Kathryn Bates Williams (left), violist Charlton Lee, violinists Kate Stenberg and Rick Shinozaki performed October 1 at the Berkeley Art Museum. Photo by Jim Block.