Enso Quartet at Lake Luzerne

[jbuck919]

The Lake Luzerne Summer Music Camp in the next town over from where I live is staffed by teachers and enhanced by performers often with a strong connection to Philadelphia. Part of this is is a piggybacking on the presence of the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, but in the camp has in recent years with the death of found Bert Philips and the retirement of his wife Toby Blumenthal taken on a life of its own. Its Monday night concert series consists sometimes of top-level pick-up forces and sometimes of established groups.

On Monday, July 20, I heard the Enso Quartet, a group originally formed in New Haven CT, perform a program consisting of Haydn's Quartet in D Major Opus 76 No. 5, Janacek's String Quartet No. 1, and Schumann's String Quartet No. 3 in A Major, Opus 41, No. 3. These were performances of the highest caliber and I will only comment on the Janacek.

The work that was programmed in that position was the Bartok Quartate No. 1, which I would rather have heard. (I have this thing about perfect programs, you see.) In fact, no direct announcement was made about the change, and we would not have known about it if the first violinist had not recited something from the Tolstoy story "The Kreutzer Sonata" which inspired the Janacek. Otherwise I, for one, would have known that it was not Bartok but not what it was instead. Much as I try to keep an open mind about these things (I can hear the laughter coming all the way to Stony Creek), the Janacek impressed me as something of a pice of fits and starts rather than a coherent composition, a characterization shared by the violinist though she put it in a more complimentary way. ("Episodic" may have been the word she used.) This did not keep me from enjoying the evening, and I would not resist another program just because it included the Janacek. Haydn is frequently programmed but there is so much of him that any single quartet is not heard that often, and the stunning Schumann quartet may also qualify as a piece too seldom programmed.