The Blair String Quartet w/ pianist Amy Dorfman

Friday, Sept. 28

Ingram Hall, Blair School of Music, 2400 Blakemore Ave.

Call 322-7651 for more information

Good instruments alone do not good concerts make; they have to sound in a suitable space. That’s especially true of acoustic instruments—including voices. Electronic amplification brings its own set of variables: There are Stradivarius violins and roadside specials, and there are good sound systems and other sound systems. When musicians are obliged to “plug in,” what comes out may vary widely from one venue to the next. But for acoustic instruments, good space is itself the without-which-not.

Currently, our town does not have a good large acoustical space. When soloists appear with our orchestra in Jackson Hall (soprano Kathleen Battle, for instance, or violinist Isaac Stern), both soloists and audiences may feel ripped off. And even without soloists, our symphony can safely play only large and loud. This may be why the orchestra often plays to a half-filled house. It’s surely a compelling reason to long for the symphony’s announced performance hall, to be ready in 2006.

The impact of a suitable environment on the sound of acoustic instruments can be experienced now in a smaller venue—the new Ingram Hall at Blair. Inaugurated just last January, the 600-seat space has already hosted some memorable performances, but none finer than soprano Dawn Upshaw’s concert a couple weeks ago. Another fine evening is promised when the Blair String Quartet, assisted by pianist Amy Dorfman, performs in that same space this Friday.

Upshaw, with pianist Gary Chapman as accompanist, kept a full house enthralled from first syllable through two encores. Upshaw (b. 1960), now in full vocal maturity, has one of the world’s great voices, and Chapman is a very accomplished accompanist. But neither could have done what they did without an acoustically responsive space.

Upshaw’s voice is uniquely versatile: She sings everything from Gorecki to Rodgers and Hart. On this evening her program ranged from the 16th to the 21st centuries, from classical art song to Broadway showtune. She sang in Galician, French and Russian, as well as in Renaissance and Broadway anglo. And Upshaw doesn’t just sing: She performs; she puts on a persona proper to the situation, whether lamenting adult, playful small child or carefree swaggering lover. She delivered as nearly perfect a musical evening as one could hope to hear.

That’s a hard act for the Blair String Quartet to follow. Ingram Hall leaves performers nowhere to hide. Especially in such a space, “chamber music” might well be called “naked music.” And the string quartet emblematizes the intimate “chamber” sound: Though the quartet consists of four distinct voices, those voices are filaments of one sonority. These violin family members (two violins, a viola and a cello) are able to fine-tune a chord or a unison the way choristers can—and to mistune it as well. Any lapse can be audible flatulence at a table à deux. Given this risk, the Blair Quartet’s performance history makes their table attractive indeed.

That history encompasses the range of repertory for their ensemble—from Haydn and Mozart to Morton Subotnick—including some marvelous collaborations with voices and other instruments. Friday’s program offers three selections—one by Joseph Haydn (b. 1732); one by the American iconoclast Charles Ives (b. 1874); and one by Robert Schumann (b. 1810), a seminal German Romantic. For the Schumann quintet, pianist Amy Dorfman joins the band.

Music for string quartet (with or without invited guests) has a problematic history. But by consensus Haydn perfected the form as we know it, usually a whole divided into four movements, like a glass window divided into panes. Each pane has its own integrity and interest, and contributes uniquely to the complete effect. Old Haydn was young Mozart’s model (they played together in each other’s quartets); these two have been emulated ever since.

Haydn, at a time when all music was live music, was hired as a young man by one of Europe’s richest families to make a lot of music for a parade of important visitors. He was given his own orchestra, and virtual carte blanche in using it. His prodigious output, including 108 symphonies and 68 string quartets, set the standard for classical music, and aristocratic guests spread his reputation far and wide.

Haydn’s windows are not splendidly luxuriant Gothic roses. Rather, they are rectilinear; they let in patterns of light without staining it. This music is Monticello and the University of Virginia—not Notre Dame cathedral, and not Victorian bric-a-brac. It embodies balance, proportion, light and space and minimal ornamentation, infused with wit and healthy levels of unabashed testosterone. Friday evening’s selection is the String Quartet in D Major, op. 76, no. 5. Produced in the ripeness of his powers, it is robust vintage classicism—composed when Beethoven was 27 years old and Mozart six years in an unmarked grave. The times they were a-changin’.

They were a-changin’ again some 100 years later when maverick Yankee composer Charles Ives wrote the second of his two string quartets. Though nobody knew it then, Ives was already doing things Schoenberg and others would later get credit for originating. Convinced that music had become prudish and prettified, Ives set out to generate some rowdy musical fun. He imagined his second quartet as a meeting of four men, each a stubborn individual, talking about politics. In the music’s three movements, the four men, in Ives’ words, “fight, shake hands, shut up—then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament.” The first two movements are raucous; the third and last, “The Call of the Mountains,” is an Emersonian meditation, marked adagio.

Chronologically between Haydn and Ives comes Robert Schumann, who devoted his too-brief career to rescuing good Romanticism from bad. His compositions demonstrate his affinities with Johannes Brahms, to whom he was mentor: Both he and Brahms marry “classical” discipline to “Romantic” expressiveness. Schumann did not write much chamber music, and the best of it was done in 1842—three string quartets, his only piano quartet, and his only piano quintet. The Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, this evening’s offering, is widely regarded as the jewel in his chamber music crown.

Though pianist Amy Dorfman is BSQ’s guest in this performance, the piano in this composition is primus inter pares: Its opening statement lays down the material out of which everything else is made. British critic Donald Tovey has called the finished structure a “mosaic” instead of a “landscape picture.” The definiteness of outline, and the lapidarian quality of the tiles, necessitate and justify “an otherwise unusual simplicity and hardness of outline.” This is not misty music. Rather, its marriage of lucent brilliance and artful design give it compelling emotional force.

Dorfman and the BSQ played this quintet last year out of town. Coming back to it now, she says, she finds the realization of it continuing to evolve. Rehearsal is a process of ongoing discovery, of seeing deeper into the music. It’s not simply delivering again what you know already. That’s why live music in a good space is unique and irreplaceable. That’s why Ingram Hall is a municipal treasure. That’s why a new world-class symphony hall in downtown Nashville could be another one.