22 Winter 2013

LEAVE-TAKING

Top: Founding Violist: Kazuhide Isomura Bottom: The 1969 Originals: (l to r) Koichiro Harada,

Yoshiko Nakura, Sadao Harada, Kazuhide Isomura

23

Tenth Anniversary: S. Harada, Kikuei Ikeda, K. Harada, & Isomura

ooking back, the signs are all there.Even if the Tokyo String Quartet hadn’t

announced its forthcoming breakup, the group just finished recording the late Beethoven quartets —for the second time. Then came a Schubert Quintet in C major recording—another piece that

quartets want to do one last time. Concerts included the last quartets of Schubert and Bartók. On the cover of the quartet's latest recording, a Dvor̆ák/Smetana program, the players are standing with their coats on, getting ready to leave.

And they are.“I'm still obsessed with the string quartet literature, but

43 years playing with the quartet is not a short period of time,” says the ebullient, 67-year-old violist Kazuhide Isomura, a founding member. “The end came sooner than I thought...but now, I can’t wait.”

“When I joined I wondered, How long am I going to be living this life? I hoped to have more than a handful of years, enough to learn the repertoire and to become immersed in it,” says Clive Greensmith, only the second cellist in the quartet’s history. “After 14 years it was easier to say that there was an investment of time and energy, and we've covered all the standard rep.”

“A good adjective would be bittersweet, especially when we visit places where we really felt at home,” says Martin

Beaver, first violinist since 2002, citing Philadelphia, Houston and New York’s 92nd Street Y as the group’s mainstays. “We’re very close to the people involved.”

In truth, most of the repertoire omens suggesting the end were accidental: Programs are often planned two years in advance, and it just so happened that lots of swan songs figured into what the group wanted to do. Given the diffi-culties of post-9/11 travel with a quartet of Stradivarius instruments on loan from the Nippon Foundation, you can understand the psychology of playing the most substantial repertoire once finally arriving at the concert venue.

At first, the two older Japanese members announced their simultaneous retirements; applications were taken for replacements. But even with the precedent of the Budapest Quartet taken over by Russians, Beaver and Greensmith couldn't decide how to respect the group’s ethnic history. Should replacements be Japanese born? And trained? Finally, in the spring of 2012, the quartet’s joint decision was announced—with a formal ending on July 6, 2013, at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. There, the Tokyo Quartet plays goodbye with Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 77 No. 1, the Debussy String Quartet, and Bartok’s String Quartet No. 6, written by the composer in ambivalent anticipation of leaving his home in Hungary. “Usually we don’t argue very much,” says second violinist Kikuei Ikeda, “but we talked a lot about this last program.”

What might Ikeda most like to do before that July disbanding? “Play with different violist, right?” interjects

LLEAVE-TAKING

AFTER A 43-YEAR CAREER, THE TOKYO STRING QUARTET

WILL DISBAND THIS SUMMER. BUT FIRST, THE ILLUSTRIOUS

ENSEMBLE IS REVISITING ITS MOST TREASURED REPERTOIRE.

BY DAVID PATRICK STEARNS

Isomura. “I read your mind!”

There’s laughter all around.The rest of the chamber music world isn’t so jovial. “It

feels much like being told that a close friend is terminally ill,” wrote Toronto music critic John Terauds on the Musical Toronto blog.

Though the Tokyo Quartet has had more first-violin changes than any major quartet in recent history, it has pursued a surprisingly consistent course since 1969 (with the exception of its late-1990s years with violinist Mikhail Kopelman—more on that later), thanks to a peerless blend of sound and exceptional reverence for the music at hand. Though known as Bartók specialists, they maintain a core repertoire of Haydn and Schubert. Interventionists, they’re not. During an afternoon at cellist Greensmith’s home in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., I described the group as “objectivists on steroids.” They liked that. Well, some of them.

Though the Tokyo Quartet members have often seemed cut from similar cloth—the original members were all educated at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, and the current ones play the supposedly well-matched Paganini Strads—there’s no question that the famous blend is a product of much effort from a highly individualistic four-some.

The two Japanese members are in their 60s and are as much products of The Juilliard School as they were of the Toho school in their native Japan. Violist Isomura—his friends call him Kazu—is the most outgoing of the four; and besides his Toho pedigree, studied violin with Ivan Galamian and viola with Walter Trampler. Second violinist Ikeda is the rock, though the least talkative of the four, a Toho graduate who studied with Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard, joining the group in 1974, replacing Yoshiko Nakura.

The two younger members are in their mid-40s. Canadian-born

Beaver counts Josef Gingold and Henryk Szeryng among his teachers and won a silver medal at the 1993 Queen Elisabeth Competition. His placid exterior is known to mask a particularly wicked sense of humor. British-born Clive Greensmith, known to be the smoothest talker but also

perhaps the most outspoken, grad-uated from the Royal North College of Music and

the Musik-hochschule in Cologne, and counts pianist Simone Dinnerstein among his in-laws.

Because Ikeda is reserved—he doesn’t want to give reasons for his departure except to say that “it’s personal”—Kazu is the one who gives a candid picture of the postwar Japanese culture from which the Tokyo Quartet originally emerged. The Suzuki method was everywhere. Kazu’s mother associated Western classical music with a more peaceful world. Though his father wasn’t especially attuned to music, he was seized by the romance and prestige of the Western string quartet, made sure his four sons had string-instrument lessons, and even had a portrait painted of what they might look like as a grown-up string quartet. It still hangs in their living room.

Though Kazu and the original violinist Koichiro Harada were similarly seized with interest in string quartet music and began exploring it together at age 15, the Juilliard Quartet's 1965 residency in Nikko, Japan, was what sealed their commitment to the art form. All four future founding members of the Tokyo Quartet were there, and the impact was seismic. However, they went rather separate ways before meeting again at Juilliard.

Through contacts met during their summer at the Aspen Music Festival, Kazu and original cellist Sadao Harada (no relation to Koichiro) were told they could earn money to attend Juilliard by spending a year in Nashville, where they landed positions in the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, as well as recording sessions in the country-music capital of the world. Kazu was heard alongside Chet Atkins and Glenn Campbell, though often in overdubbed orchestrations on what had already been recorded. Among Harada’s phantom collaborators was Elvis Presley.

“THOUGH THE TOKYO HAS HAD MORE FIRST-VIOLIN CHANGES THAN

ANY OTHER MAJOR QUARTET IN RECENT HISTORY, IT HAS PURSUED

A SURPRISINGLY CONSISTENT COURSE SINCE 1969.”

Today’s Tokyo: Ikeda, Greensmith, Beaver, Isomura

pon finally migrating east to Juilliard, the quar-tet formed; and success was all but immediate, with prizes from Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York and such praise at the Munich Competition that the jury named the Tokyo Quartet first and refused to give a second prize, feeling that nobody else

had come close. “We never had to promote ourselves,” says Kazu. Yet

never did they take their success for granted. The group's New York debut at Town Hall was still at a time when critics wrote overnight for the New York Times, and the first edi-tion could be found in the wee hours. Like anxious Broadway show producers, they waited up—and weren't disappointed.

Any number of other subsequent reviews, in the United States and elsewhere, had a cynical streak, suggesting that the Tokyo Quartet was all about technical precision over feeling, even making comparisons with Japanese technology. The members, among the first native Japanese classical musicians to gain international fame, tried to give the situation a positive spin: “We had a frontier spirit,” says Kazu. But those reviews hurt.

“I hated it,” he says.Still, they settled in New York City rather than in Japan,

Kazu adds, because “we could be ourselves.” Japanese pia-nist Mitsuko Uchida, who settled in London, couldn’t have said it better. The Tokyo Quartet did maintain its Japanese identity with frequent visits home and commissioned Toru Takemitsu’s String Quartet, “A Way a Lone” (inspired by Finnegan’s Wake), to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

As with the accidental omens that popped up around the group’s farewell season, the group’s famous set of Bartók Quartet recordings on Deutsche Grammophon was originally to be shared with the Amadeus Quartet, which withdrew from the project. But the Tokyo Quartet’s heart also belonged to Haydn, and the ensemble agreed to make the entire Bartók set in exchange for a complete set of Haydn Quartets. Though many of the Haydn recordings never hap-pened, the acclaim that greeted their Bartók meant that a specialty was born.

All was not well, however, with first violinist Koichiro Harada. Considered one of the most beautiful players in the business, his sensitivity was as apparent offstage as on, and, according to other members, the high-pressure life did not suit his temperament. Peter Oundjian, then 26, had a major soloist career in the offing, but after being invited to informal chamber music sessions with the group, gladly phased out that part of his work to devote his time to the Tokyo. “I’m the youngest of five siblings, so there was something natural about stepping into this group where everybody was eight to ten years older than me,” says Oundjian. “I loved making

my siblings laugh. And I loved making them [the Tokyo Quartet] laugh.”

The language spoken at rehearsal needed to change from Japanese to English, which dramatically altered the group dynamic. “Japanese leaves a lot of room for ambiva-lence,” says Oundjian. “With English, they couldn’t beat around the bush. Rehearsals became clearer and freer. Our relationship was very, very healthy in those early years.”

He recalls high-spirited European tours, for which they would rent a large Mercedes and drive from engagement to engagement all over the continent. “We were like the Rat Pack,” he says.

But Oundjian was experiencing problems. Older members observed his exceptionally intense practice habits. For first violinists, the concerts themselves are the stress equivalent to playing three concertos. As early as the late 1980s, Oundjian was losing the use of his ring finger due to focal dystonia, but was clever enough to adjust his fingerings that even his close colleagues didn’t notice. Near the end, though, he was sometimes getting through concerts on two-and-a-half fingers. “Sometimes they sensed that I was on the edge and would play a little bit louder for me so I would just go into the texture. They were fantastic,” he said, “but I remember driving to Avery Fisher Hall and think-ing, ‘Oh my God, am I going to get through Op. 18?’ ”

Still, some of the best TSQ concerts with Oundjian took place the year before his departure, the 1994 25th-anniver-sary Beethoven cycle at La Scala. At the end, as an encore, they played the Cavatina from Op. 130. And upon finishing, the spellbound audience didn’t make a sound. “We were all in tears—and we aren’t big criers,” he recalls. “You had this unified feeling of togetherness.”

Oundjian had a phoenix-like ascent in the conducting world (he’s now at the helm of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in his home town) and had become acquainted with the Russia-

U

Peter Oundjian today

26 Winter 2013

based Borodin Quartet when the two groups played a Beethoven/Shostakovich cycle in Vienna. First violinist Mikhail Kopelman had emigrated to the United States and was tired of all the travel involved with maintaining a near twenty-year tenure with a group based a third of the way around the world. Oundjian helped broker Kopelman's elegant transition to the Tokyo Quartet. Six years later, Kopelman departed in disappointment. Both sides discuss that period with sorrow.

“There was a huge difference between my mentality and theirs,” said Kopelman when reached at the Eastman School of Music, where he teaches. “We had a nice relation-ship, no question about it. But it’s like in family, sometimes you just can't work out the way you want to do something...It was a tense period...and we didn't make one professional recording.”

Besides introducing Russian repertoire to a group that rarely strayed into Shostakovich, Kopelman is one to go with the inspiration of the moment during performance—in contrast to Tokyo’s Juilliard Quartet-influenced belief that the quartet should sound like a single instrument. Those who caught the Tokyo on the right concerts during that period may well have had the best of those two worlds. The tension could be galvanizing, though Kopelman’s out-sized personality unquestionably dominated the group. When the Beaux Arts Trio disbanded, Menaham Pressler admitted his stormy period with violinist Daniel Guillet was among the most artistically interesting. Might that also have been the case with Tokyo’s Kopelman period?

In any event, Kopelman successor Martin Beaver is said to regard the longtime players with great deference, and with that came a return to the more integrated sound of old. Combined with the possibilities of its all-Strad sound recorded with SACD technology, the group won a recording arrangement with Harmonia Mundi, which doesn’t routinely record extended cycles of standard repertoire. “New sound, new homogeneity, I loved it,” says Robina Young, executive producer at Harmonia Mundi USA. “They’re perfection.”

You’d think they would stay together if only to hang onto their precious instruments, which will revert to the Nippon Foundation this summer. Truth is, the famous Tokyo blend

wasn't easy with these

instruments. Though all were owned by Niccolò Paganini, two were made more

than forty years apart and are quite different in character. That said, Tokyo’s long-term consistency is even more remarkable. Example: Near the end of the presto move-ment of Beethoven’s Op. 131, the group’s early recording during the pre-Strad Oundjian period, is a particularly scintillating moment when they all play on the bridge of their instruments. The later recording has a similar sense of surprise. “That’s a compliment,” says Beaver, “because those instruments don’t want to sound ugly. It’s hard to get a real ponticello.” In other words, Strads have their own challenges.

The Tokyo members have artist-in-residence status at Yale Graduate School of Music, and the older members will continue there, while Beaver and Greensmith will be based in Los Angeles at the Colburn School, where they will co-direct the string chamber music program. And they’ve talked about forming a piano trio. Ikeda is already sched-uled to play with members of the Keller Quartet in a July concert at the Norfolk Festival after the Tokyo farewell.

It’s hard to say what their relationship will be after that. The Guarneri Quartet was famous for traveling separately, coming together only for rehearsals and concerts. Post-breakup, those musicians keep playing concerts together—individually and as a group—as if they can’t stay away from each other. The Tokyo players are close with past members: Even Kopelman speaks well of them. Kazu is in touch with the original violinist Harada. The quartet has played string quartet concertos in Toronto under Oundjian’s baton. “It was as if we were playing in a quintet,” says Kazu. Considering how many players have come and gone from the Tokyo Quartet, future reunions could be a nonet—or larger.

David Patrick Stearns is a classical music critic and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“KOPELMAN INTRODUCED RUSSIAN

REPERTOIRE TO A GROUP THAT

RARELY STRAYED INTO SHOSTAKOVICH.”

The Kopelman Era: Mikhail Kopelman

with Sadao Harada, Isomura, & Ikeda