The purported theme of "All the World for Love," an evening of poetry and chamber music presented by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, was love as a muse for both genres. But what came across was how much each is immersed in the syntax of the other. Listeners at Jordan Hall last Friday night got a chance to hear how rhythms, cadences, and linguistic structure make each art form the slightly distorted mirror image of the other. There could scarcely be a better partnership than that between former poet laureate Pinsky and the renowned Hungarian quartet to demonstrate the comparison. Each has a resonant, elegant sound and a keen attention to phrasing.
Of course, love played a major role in the evening as well. But it was love’s darker side that dominated. Leos Janácek’s Second Quartet (Intimate Letters) is rooted in his fervent, implausible love for a woman 46 years his junior; Britten’s Third Quartet was an outgrowth of his opera Death in Venice, which adapts the Thomas Mann novella about an old writer’s obsession with a young boy. The poetic side included such disturbing ruminations on the difficulties of love as Edward Arlington Robinson’s "Eros Turannos" and Louise Glück’s "Mock Orange." The shadows helped save the program from mere sentiment; they gave it the edges it needed to intrigue rather than merely soothe.
The Janácek and Britten must be two of the most difficult works in the quartet literature: they reset the dimensions of quartet form, explore the full range of string textures, and venture often into a harmonic no man’s land. The Takács handled these considerable obstacles without losing its customary rich string tone. Even in the Janácek’s most violent outbursts, the Quartet’s beautiful, refined sound was palpable, centered on the dark, muscular playing of violist Roger Tapping and the solos of first-violinist Edward Dusinberre.
As for Pinsky, he’s the closest thing poetry has to a rock star. His reading of the passage from Vergil’s Georgics that inspired the Adagio from Barber’s String Quartet went a long way toward rescuing the music from its reputation as a dirge, though I still can’t reconcile the elegance of Barber’s work with the lusty tumult of the verse. But after the inexorable tread of the passacaglia that concludes the Britten, Pinsky’s own wonderful poem "The Want Bone" closed the evening by showing that the ambiguity of expression is at the heart of each discipline.
