JUST RELEASED! EYBLER QUARTET CD OF WEISS QUARTETS
********************************************************************************
Many years ago, I was slowly easing through Vienna’s Haydn Museum, once the residence of the composer. It was almost eerily quiet and inviting of contemplation when, with a dynamic air of urgency, an American tourist burst into the stillness and declared, “I have a plane to catch and my cab is waiting outside, but I love Haydn most of all and had to come back one more time.” “Stand where you wish and I’ll take your photo and send it to you,” said I – which we did right then and which I did later. When he departed, I sensed that a pilgrim had visited his Mecca and departed fulfilled, blessed in a way. Haydn does that to people.
Thanks to Bud Roach and his Hammer Baroque series on Hamilton’s Locke Street, we had opportunity for similar blessing last Saturday when the Eybler Quartet visited to perform the first three of Haydn’s six Opus 33 String Quartets. As I listened, I sensed an increasing warmth of human connection between musicians and audience and composer. I felt the joyful energy of being alive in the music of Haydn as played with the undeniable commitment, mastery and joie de vivre of the Eybler Quartet. But then, Haydn and the Eybler Quartet are certainly each at home in the spirit of the other. The concert began and the very atmosphere of the place we all occupied was soon made of celebration. Please note that the Eybler Quartet recording of Haydn’s six Opus 3 quartets is available on their site or from Analekta. I play mine often.
For many years my go-to recording of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin was Nathan Milstein’s. As with other recordings I held dear, I knew I could turn to this one for its qualities of heart and spirit, all infused with seductive virtuosity, as an inspiring and supportive presence I needed at that moment in my life. But on Saturday, at the Eybler Quartet concert, I finally got myself a new recording of this treasured music by Eybler violinist Julia Wedman, and now as I write I find myself in something of trance as I listen to it. It’s a state of mind or being I know well from listening to Wedman’s previous recording of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas inspired by paintings she saw in Salzburg and revisited the very next day, violin in hand. Wedman explains that playing the Mystery Sonatas “inspired me to become a baroque violinist.” Her recording is on SONO Luminus and listening to it becomes a fulfilling experience of one’s ethereal, or spiritual, being. And yes, I play this one often too.
I once interviewed an Egyptian novelist who, while in prison, had witnessed a fellow prisoner tortured to death. As I asked him about his life, he sometimes responded by asking me some relevant specifics about my own existence, and I soon welcomed the opportunity to be meeting him on another, more human, level of honesty. Which leads me, if you’ll pardon my roundabout return to Wedman’s recording of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, to reasons I appreciate this recoding. I feel throughout a deep and constant human truth in the performance, one that is at once poetic, gutsy, existentially complex, vulnerable yet secure of purpose, and emotionally open to the imminent unknowns of life. I feel here a vigorous grasping of the demands of human existence and also a wisdom that knows a lightness of being to be another language of human truth. This Bach seems to say, “May I dance as I explore the meaning of everything?”
Certainly, Wedman is expertly at home in the implicit needs of Bach’s music for delicate shadings of airy nuance, for heels dug in the earth assertiveness, for the constant interplay of statement and afterthought both wistful and logical, for technical mastery that holds perfectly true in shaping human meanings. A number of times I sat still and breathless at runs of notes that seemed free of gravity as they created new realities true to some ineffable mystery. At times I felt a passenger atop my drifting mind as my masters, Bach and Wedman, conjured realities just beyond my grasp. But then, this recording is indeed a continuum of new discoveries, a collaboration of composer and interpreter that with creative virtuosity and human self-searching honesty give us new realities and new meanings so that, as well Bach’s and Wedman’s, we live in awe of new worlds of our own. This is a special performance that draws listeners toward and into their unknown selves. This CD is available on the Gallery Players label.