No stopping Music at Kohl Mansion

Judging from the three concerts already given, these should feature superior music-making excellently presented. Programs of Gabriel Fauré and Ludwig van Beethoven, reviewed here last Nov. 21, were performed with intense commitment and were almost as gripping as if the audience were there in person.

The third concert, featuring the Alexander String Quartet last Sunday, Jan. 24, was no less captivating. Along with the previous program of Beethoven sonatas for cello and piano, this concert celebrated Beethoven’s 250th birthday. The work played, nearly an hour in itself, was Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130, with its original “Grosse Fuge” final movement. Beethoven had removed this movement at the plea of his publishers to make the work more acceptable and saleable. But in this brave modern world, it’s usually put back where it belongs.

The Alexander players proved in this concert that it’s possible to give a seriously dedicated and compelling performance of Op. 130 with an even strain and consistent tone, without overloading the fierceness of the Grosse Fuge, the querulous irregularity of the Danza Tedesca or even the melting beauty of the Cavatina. It was simple, pure and honest music-making throughout.

Unlike previous performers in this series, the Alexander Quartet is of local origin, so it was able to play its concert in Kohl Mansion’s Great Hall, the series’ usual venue for live concerts. Without an audience, the hall is even more deeply resonant than when it’s peopled. The recording was excellent, with the sound full-bodied and clearly defined with each instrument audible. The video is varied and not distracting. These qualities have distinguished the previous Kohl videos as well.

Anyone who regrets missing Kohl’s spectacular Violins of Hope special concert Jan. 19, 2020, or who attended and wishes to revisit it will be pleased to learn that a concert recording has now been released as a Pentatone Hybrid SACD and download (PTC 5186879).

Titled “Violins of Hope: Live at Kohl Mansion,” the recording preserves “Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope,” the song cycle by Jake Heggie given its first performance at that concert. Librettist Gene Scheer fashioned lyrics in the voices of these violins which had survived the Nazi Holocaust in World War II. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke sang them in Heggie’s setting, accompanied by some of the actual instruments in the hands of solo violinist Daniel Hope and a string quartet of musicians from the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. It’s a gripping drama in seven movements lasting 40 minutes, which Heggie considers to have been for him “a transformative event personally and professionally.”

The CD also includes the rest of the concert, the quartet performing two of the darkest and most serious works in the string quartet repertoire, Schubert’s “Quartettsatz” in C Minor and Felix Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80. The whole is, for Kohl’s Executive Director Patricia Kristof Moy, a way for “the transformative power of music to honor the memory of the lives saved and lost in WWII Europe.”