Concert review: Ying Quartet

For a packed house, including dozens of people seated on stage, the Ying Quartet opened the 62nd Bowdoin Festival with Haydn’s Quartet in G minor op.20 no.3, its first movement all raw vigour until the prim, graceful ending. Other highlights included the ghostliness at the end of the Minuet and the way the finale’s phrases were capped by well-timed rests.

Phillip Ying, violist and the festival’s co-artistic director – along with his brother, cellist David Ying – introduced Billy Childs’s String Quartet no.2, ‘Awakening’ (written for the ensemble in 2012), inspired by Janáček’s ‘Intimate Letters’ Quartet. Known as a jazz pianist, Childs wrote the work after his wife almost died from a pulmonary embolism.

The first movement, ‘Wake up Call’, is tense and icy, a hospital visit with floods of nervous tremolos and tiny, agitated bow strokes. Anguish appears in the second movement, ‘The White Room’, with echoes of the opening nervousness, before the gentle final bars. The final one, titled ‘Song of Healing’, is mostly legato, carefully shaded through the peaceful ending; during the closing bars, there’s a passage for cello and first violin representing Childs and his wife. Though other groups have performed the piece over the past 14 years, the Ying’s commitment had both passion and the ring of truth.

The opening movement of Beethoven’s Eighth Quartet op.59 no.2 was well served by the Ying’s collective muscle. In the hymn-like movement, the ensemble captured its inherent darkness, before plunging into the third and making marvellous work with its rhythmic trickiness. For the galloping finale – with the foursome’s violins, Robin Scott and Janet Ying – the group realised the final reiteration of the theme with invigorating ferocity.

BRUCE HODGES