Guarneri Press Clips 7-30-09

8/14/2019 Guarneri Press Clips 7-30-09

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104111631&sc=emaf

After 45 Years, A Guarneri Quartet FarewellListen Now

[12 min 7 sec]add to playlist

Dorothea von Haeften

After 45 years, the Guarneri Quartet is going on a farewell tour.

All Things Considered, May 17, 2009 - The members of the Guarneri Quartet at least its

three original members have known each other for a long time. They went to music school

together and, just for fun, played string quartets. Now, 45 years later, violinists Arnold

Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, plus relative newcomer cellist Peter Wiley arestill playing concerts filled with Beethoven, Mozart, Dvorak and Schubert. But not for long.

This fall, the famed Guarneris are calling it quits. And, as they told NPR's Rebecca Roberts

recently during a rehearsal at the University of Maryland, it didn't take them long to make the

decision.

"I think we had about four minutes to decide," violist Michael Tree says. "Because we had to

be on stage this was backstage at a concert in New York and we had no trouble

agreeing immediately."

First violinist Steinhardt butts in to remind Tree that they did indeed "sleep on it," but when

they next talked about quitting, they all agreed quickly.

"I think we felt that it would be better to retire when we were still playing pretty well," Steinhardt

says. "You know a lot of people come backstage and say 'You shouldn't retire the concert

was so great.' Well, I always think, that's the time to retire. Forty-five years is a fantastic run.

Let's not be too greedy."


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The Guarneris (including original cellist David Soyer, who instructed Wiley) played music

together for fun at first, and Steinhardt says the idea of forming a string quartet in the 1960s,

when there weren't that many around, was an improbable dream. Eventually, their impromptu

performances became full-fledged concerts at school and elsewhere. As they began spending

more time together each year at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, Steinhardt says, the

formal establishment of the quartet "just happened."

It's often been said that playing in a string quartet is like being in a marriage. The advantages

include the ability to practically finish one another's musical sentences. But the challenge is

how to keep the musical marriage sounding fresh night after night and to keep the bickering to

a minimum.

"The intensity and the stress of always traveling together, rehearsing together, going to parties

together you know, you might have been sick and tired of me," Steinhardt says, addressing

his colleagues. "Maybe you are sick and tired of me?"

"Don't answer that," Dalley says.

But the question the Guarneris are often asked is how they do it how they've spent so many

decades working so closely together. Tree says the group never came up with a great answer."There are certain things that are quite obvious," Tree says. "We all have to have respect

mutual respect for each other. And we have to have a certain sameness, I think, of tastes. For

example, if there were someone in the group that were just gung-ho on playing very, very

experimental, avant-garde music, that could cause a little bit of dissension because that's an

entirely different outlook. I think we all basically agreed on just about everything, except when

it came down to the nitty-gritty of rehearsing. And that's when that question of mutual respect

comes into play and it becomes very important."

Steinhardt offered another explanation: "We are like four brothers in a family, and we are not

shy about saying 'That was too loud!' or 'We've got to fix that intonation there' or 'Why such a

quick tempo? Mozart didn't write a quick tempo!' So we're above board about all these things,

really like people in a family who can dismiss the polite stuff, you know?"

The Guarneri Quartet will give its final performances this October in Florida.


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Friday, April 24, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/23/AR2009042304281.html

The Guarneri, Bowing Out With Distinction

The Guarneri String Quartet, calling it quits after making music and recordings since the 1960s, performs tonight at the Clarice SmithCenter. (By Dorothea Von Haeften)

By Robert BatteySpecial to The Washington Post

As the venerable and venerated Guarneri Quartet completes its farewell season, giving its last

Washington area concert tonight at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, the passing is being

marked by a batch of rereleases of its vintage recordings.

ArkivMusic.com, a CD and download provider, has licensed a trove of the quartet's legendary RCA

recordings from its youthful heyday in the 1960s and '70s, when it was the greatest string quartet inthe world. The group's unprecedented success led to longevity: When David Soyer retired as cellist

in 2002 (replaced by Peter Wiley), the Guarneri had set a record for the longest tenure without a

personnel change of any major quartet.

The group has always been one of the highest distinction and has continued recording throughout itsexistence, but certainly the virtuosity and intensity of its last two decades were on a different level

than that heard in the first three. An entire generation has thus grown up being only dimly aware of

the volcanic musical force the Guarneri once represented. The ArkivMusic releases are the first

appearance of these iconic recordings since the LP era.

That is itself a scandal; RCA records (now enfolded into the Sony/BMG conglomerate) had adistinguished history of loyalty toward its top artists. Fritz Reiner, Artur Rubinstein and Jascha

Heifetz, among others, enjoyed long, productive relationships with the label, and their recordings

have never left the catalogues from the day they were first released, some of them passing through


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multiple formats. Chamber music is a less popular genre, but the Guarneri's preeminence and

uniqueness was fully comparable to those artists.

To be fair, the Guarneri's classic Beethoven quartet cycle has been available on CD, as have its

matchless recordings of chamber music with Rubinstein. But these eight new ArkivMusic releases,encompassing 34 works, bring back to our ears playing that has never been heard since, and which

should never have left the field. While the notion of "highlights" for material of this exalted level is

misplaced, both the Mendelssohn/Schumann and Brahms sets are the quintessential Guarneri, each

of the four artists taking wing on their solos, the tutti passages blazing with fervor.

The Guarneri certainly didn't invent great quartet playing. For the genre to be as vital, and for somany composers to have written so many masterpieces, there have to have been high-level

practitioners throughout its history. Famous soloists such as Joseph Joachim, Fritz Kreisler, William

Primrose, David Oistrakh and Janos Starker all spent time in quartets, and the Guarneri's mostcelebrated precursors included the Budapest, Italiano, Borodin and Amadeus quartets. But those

notwithstanding, what the Guarneri forged was something new.

The Guarneri operated on the principle that homogeneity was only one of many expressive tools.

Their individual sounds were simply too virile and colorful to be subsumed into some corporate

ideal. The group's hallmarks were the shimmering beauty of violinist Arnold Steinhardt's upperregister, the warmth and absolute security of John Dalley's supporting voice on second violin, the

soulful interjections of Michael Tree's viola, and cellist Soyer's gruff, sapient foundation. The

Guarneri's approach did not always reflect exactly what you saw in the score, but it drew out thedeepest humanity behind the notes. Each member was striving for an expressive ideal of beauty that

could at times seem in conflict with notions of perfect quartet protocol. The result was a churning,

boiling intensity, from which it was impossible to turn away lest you miss a single phrase.

Guarneri Press Clips 7-30-09

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