By Daniel Buckwalter
At least we’ve had Delgani String Quartet during the pandemic, streamed as it was for most of us.
No live stream performance of classical music can properly express the instantaneous energy or tenderness that is generated when absorbing the genre in person. The animation of a focused audience, particularly with standing ovations at the end of works well done, is a needed element to all concerts. One feeds off the other.
Still, Eugene-based Delgani ends its 2020-21 season with a stirring flourish that reminds everyone who tunes in what could have been this year at the sanctuary of the Christian Science Church in Eugene, if not for the vexing pandemic.
Its Sunday performances of works by Dmitri Shostakovich, Antonín Dvořák and Tomáš Svoboda are delights that leave me — and others, I’m sure— wishing hard for a return to in-person concerts next season. The program repeats with another live stream on Tuesday.
Delgani was fortunate on Sunday to have a small audience, and violinists Wyatt True and Nelly Kovalev (subbing for Jannie Wei), violist Kimberlee Uwate and cellist Eric Alterman are in top form.
Svoboda’s 10th quartet opens the show with what Uwate describes as having “joy, life and fun in it.”
The composer, who was born in the Czech Republic and lives in Portland, has composed a series of quartets, and three of them (including the 10th) will be part of a Delgani album in the near future.
Svoboda has been an important composer for Delgani. I remember a night at Tsunami Books in Eugene when the quartet played this same piece. In December of that year, Delgani played it before Svoboda and his family in Portland to honor the composer’s 80th birthday.
Dvořák’s ninth quartet is next on the program. It is rich in variations, including a touch of polka.
The story behind this piece is quite something. It was completed in the months after two of his children — a 10-month old and a three-year old — died in 1877, and I could see children playing, dancing and being inquisitive, just being themselves.
The anchor of Delgani’s sixth season finale is Shostakovich’s piano quintet, a roughly 30-minute piece featuring in this case the masterful work of guest pianist Asya Gulua, who was born in Russia, immigrated to the United States in 1996 and now lives in Salem. She works for the Oregon Symphony Association, teaches, and collaborates with musicians and composers throughout the country.
Shostakovich wrote the piece, one of his best known chamber works, in a matter of months in 1940, just as the Soviet Union and all of Europe was descending into madness. The piece, in all five of its movements, reflects that. It has its triumphant and foreboding moments, not to mention mournful and reflective substance. I also sense hope and resolve in the piece, which would be needed in the face of Nazi Germany’s march east, to the rim of Moscow. The piano quintet was written for the Beethoven Quartet and premiered to great fanfare by the group with Shostakovich at the piano on Sept. 14, 1940.
All in all, this was a wonderful way for the Delgani String Quartet to wrap up a most bizarre season. We can only hope for better times next season.
Livestream concert: Delgani String Quartet
When: 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 25
Where: Tickets and link-in instructions online at delgani.org
Information: The quartet’s 2021-22 season schedule also is available online at delgani.org
