The Doric String Quartet (Alex Redington, violin, Ying Xue, violin, Hélène Clément, viola, John Myerscough, cello),

a polished, high-energy, British group, now in their 11th season, made a welcome return to the Phillips Collection on Sunday with a weighty program of late Beethoven, late Britten, and early Haydn. The Doric already has a large discography (on the Chandos label), and have been particularly praised for their Britten interpretations, which I enthusiastically echo here.  

Britten was one of the most widely-performed composers, world-wide, of the middle 20th century, but is now heard much less outside of the UK. His particular genius was for sound and texture; every piece of his uses the instruments in new ways and new combinations. The underlying musical material can be prosaic or even flaccid, but nearly everything he wrote tickles the ear in some way. His Quartet No. 3, written during his final illness, was his last large-scale work, and its lengthy finale has a poignant, leave-taking quality. In passacaglia form (which he used throughout his life), it invokes the bells of Venice and drifts off into the ether. The other movements are typical of his late style; soothing motives that gently pullulate in the slow ones and a strong sardonic Shostakovich influence in the faster ones. The Doric’s intense, focused control of Britten’s sound effects painted dazzling colors; the ending of the third movement, with harmonics in extremes of the instruments fading to nothingness, made you hold your breath. 

Beethoven’s Op. 130 quartet also has a last movement of extended length, the Große Fuge, which he later replaced with a shorter finale that balanced the rest of the work better.  But his initial conception is a matter of record, so many, if not most, quartets today give the piece in its original version, treating (or subjecting) audiences to a piece that runs three-quarters of an hour. This was the Doric’s choice as well, and their reading of the epic was detailed and thoughtful, but a little too polite. While their dynamic range (so crucial in Beethoven) was as wide as one could ever want, the expressive range was less so. In slow passages, repeated notes lacked sufficient articulation, coming out as one long tone. The many different kinds of accents in the piece were observed, but only to a point; one never heard any of the players hit a note with the explosive force that the greatest quartets of the past used.  For the principal counter-subject of the Große Fuge – an obsessive, short-long figure that is heard literally hundreds of times – Beethoven troubled himself to write in a 16th-rest in each one, to clearly separate the two notes. The Doric ignored the two notes linked lyrically together.  

Worse was thier conscious eschewing of a deeply expressive sound. All of the musicians in this fine group clearly can produce a rich, singing sonority, but if you’re not going to do it, all as one, in Beethoven’s deeply grieving Cavatina, when will you? The color they went for instead (and not internally consistently, by the way) was a clean, “objective” one, shorn of vibrato for the most part. I feel compelled to say to these excellent young players that expressive harmonies can be every bit as pungent and telling with vibrato as without, more so, really.  Surely they are familiar with the Quartetto Italiano and their own illustrious UK forbears, the Amadeus Quartet.  

This glassy sound was at its most irritating in the opening Haydn Quartet, Op. 33 No. 2, but an even bigger drawback was the Doric’s idea that Haydn’s music somehow foreshadowed Mahler’s; that a basic pulse was contrary to the expressive demands of the music and that slowing down for every rhetorical point (including imaginary ones) somehow helped the music along. Don’t even get me started on the cartoonish slides in the Scherzo; as my young niece used to say, “gag me.” For some, this hyperventilating in an early classical work may be interesting, once, in a weird sort of way; but I cannot imagine having this wayward, tempo-less reading on a recording one would listen to over and over for pleasure.

The Doric players are skillful and always in the moment; their music-making, while hardly spontaneous, is vital and sometimes intriguing. When they return, I hope to be there. And I hope they’ll play their Haydn much differently.

Top photo by George Garnier.