Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 2, 1993 TAG: 9310020064
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"You can tell a lot about the individual personalities of a quartet by looking at the stuff around their chairs."
So says second violinist David Salness of the Audubon Quartet as he opens the door of the group's cramped studio on the Tech campus and gestures around the comfortably messy quarters.
"You see, David's got a lot of business stuff over here, here's a paper on Beethoven's tempo markings by my chair, and so on."
The other David in the Audubons is first violinist David Ehrlich, who in the older tradition of quartet playing would be the leader of the group and responsible for making schedules and hiring halls. In this group, however, Ehrlich is merely first among equals.
For the record, beside violist Doris Lederer's stand is an electronic metronome, and cellist Tom Shaw's personal space is filled with pencils, pens and sheet music covered with scrawled corrections and notes.
This weekend the Audubons will kick off a two-year, six-concert cycle of the complete Beethoven string quartets in celebration of the ensemble's 20th anniversary, which will occur in June 1994.
Saturday night's sold-out concert will take place at 8 p.m. in the Squires Recital Salon on campus. The Audubons will repeat the same material at 3 p.m. Sunday in Squires Colonial Hall, for which tickets remain available.
A lecture by Salness on the music will precede both concerts 45 minutes before curtain time.
The Beethoven cycle is almost a habit with the Audubons, who performed a five-concert cycle of the same music to celebrate their first decade.
Twenty years is an age attained by few quartets, either in America or elsewhere, and it's only one indication of the rarified atmosphere in which the Audubon Quartet now moves. Part of the reason so many drop by the wayside is that chamber music in America is simply not the big-money proposition that rock or country music is.
Only the very best - or most fortunate - quartets manage to earn their livelihood solely by playing quartet literature. Most are forced to supplement their income by orchestral playing, an alternative viewed with distaste by any red-blooded chamber player. Ehrlich and Salness estimate there are only about 10 full-time quartets in America.
An even bigger factor can be the emotional wear and tear inevitable when talented performers - usually with definite ideas about how the music should be played - must coexist in a four-way artistic marriage.
"Historically, the string quartet has been an awkward beast," Shaw said. "The Budapest String Quartet got so they hated each other, and they'd have all sorts of fights over bridge - all four of them were bridge players.
"Then there was one member of a major quartet - I won't mention any names - who actually pulled a knife on another player. There have been chairs thrown, all sorts of acts of violence."
Salness added dryly, "We haven't had that kind of problem since we put a metal detector at the door to catch the guns and knives."
Shaw summed up the tense situation of some ensembles with an old string-quartet joke:
The first violinist thinks he's a great violinist; the second violinist wants to be the first violinist; the violist wants to be a violinist, and the cellist hates all violin players.
The Audubon Quartet has been a relatively stable organization: The past eight years have seen no personnel changes at all. Salness estimates that "nine or 10" musicians have been Audubons at one time or another.
"And several of those have been understood to be interim choices from the start," Salness said.
Cellist Shaw is the only original member of the group, which in 1974 also included first violinist Greg Fulkerson, second violinist Janet Brady and violist Larry Bradford.
"We decided we didn't want to be named after the first violinist - in the European tradition _ or after a school or a composer or an instrument maker. We wanted something that would sound very American. And we discovered that we all four had in common the name `Audubon.' And it's served us very well," Shaw said 1976. Ehrlich joined the group in 1984, and Salness came along about six months later, in 1985.
The lineup jelled when the group attained the chamber music equivalent of the Holy Grail: a major-label CD release. Not just once, but twice.
Toward the end of 1986, the group released an RCA compact disc which contained Peter Schickele's "American Dreams" quartet, a piece that has remained phenomenally popular among classical music audiences.
In 1989 the Audubons released a Telarc CD with oboist Pamela Woods featuring English music for oboe and strings.
It was during the Telarc sessions in Cleveland that the company's notoriously picky sound engineers insisted that Salness trim his nose hairs because they thought they could detect the sound of his breathing.
"None of us could hear a thing, but I guess they were picking up something on that equipment of theirs," Shaw said.
The Audubon Quartet pronounces itself delighted with its current arrangement as quartet-in-residence at Tech, but Ehrlich says one more ingredient would make the residency perfect.
They want the chance to nurture one or two younger quartets, an arrangement impossible at the moment because of budget restrictions.
"We enjoy coaching and teaching chamber music," Ehrlich said. "We miss it. It's part of being an artist. We wouldn't want 20 groups here, but a few would be nice."
As it stands, the quartet performs regularly for a number of Tech classes, including humanities courses titled "The Modern World" and "Romanticism and Enlightenment."
The Audubons also play for such untraditional audiences as acoustical engineering classes and architecture students.
A third compact disc, probably to be released independently, is in the works. Within two weeks the group will record Antonin Dvorak's Op. 105 quartet and Bedrich Smetana's "From My Life" at Blacksburg Presbyterian Church.
by CNB