DaPonte’s rite of passage

The quartet tackles Beethoven

by Doug Hubley

The DaPonte String Quartet play at the Portland Conservatory of Music, November 4 at 7:30 p.m. 529-4555.

DSQ: (l to r) Mark Preston, Ferdinand Liva, Dean Arthur Stein, Myles Jordan (front).

This weekend, the DaPonte String Quartet performs an all-Beethoven program in Damariscotta, Portland, and Brunswick. Programs dedicated to a single composer aren’t new, but the DaPontes have squared their shoulders, looked fate in the eye, and devoted their entire season — six concerts, 17 pieces of music — to Mr. B’s complete output for string quartet.

That’s a rare and very fine gift to those towns. There are those who believe that quartet writing reached its peak with Beethoven, and there are those who believe that the DaPontes are Maine’s best chamber group. How can you go wrong?

But what’s a feast for the fans is a rite of passage for the band, according to cellist Myles Jordan. “It’s something that we’ve always planned on,” he says. He explains that no string quartet, however accomplished it may otherwise be, can call itself mature until it has absorbed the complete Beethoven and Bartok works for that medium. (The DaPontes’ Bartok season is a year or two away yet.)

The Beethovens, particularly, are like the Appalachian Trail to a hiker or Hamlet to an actor: master them and you’ve arrived. In the Beethoven, you’re facing a towering sophistication of structure, technique, and emotion. “Those are the things that you break your head against, and at the end of it you are a respectable quartet by anybody’s yardstick,” Jordan says. “So that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing, and in another three to five years we will be, by my own estimation, one of the great quartets in the world. We’re just on the edge of it now.” (All that stands in their way is that pesky self-esteem problem.)

The other members of the DaPonte String Quartet are violist Mark Preston and violinists Ferdinand Liva and Dean Stein. The band, founded nine years ago in Philadelphia, is one of the great success stories of Maine classical music. They settled in the Midcoast area in 1996, coming north on the strength of a three-year rural arts grant, and have made Maine their home and their base for a career that ranges well beyond these borders.

In Maine, in addition to the three-town winter circuit, the group has a summer series in South Bristol, where Preston’s family has summered for the past century or so. They teach privately and in the public schools; this winter a private foundation has funded workshops at six Maine schools.

Music scholars divide Beethoven’s work into early, middle, and late periods, and each DaPonte program includes a work from each. This weekend it’s the Quartet in A Major, Op. 18, No. 5 (early), the F Major, Op. 135 (his last quartet) and the E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2 (the middle or “Golden” period).

Written around the end of the 18th century, the early quartets are modeled upon those of Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven wanted to stretch those structures from the start. “You can see his imagination is wildly stimulated by Mozart and Haydn,” Jordan says, “but at the same time he can’t go too far with these things because he still wants to be able to connect with a public and with patronage.” The A Major quartet, says Jordan, closely follows one by Mozart, but even there Ludwig succumbed to an impulse that turned a section of the last movement into something like carnival music.

By 1805, when he started the Op. 59 quartets, the composer was into his “Golden Period” and well-enough established to run with his ideas. The C Major is typical of the middle quartets — nearly double the length of the Op. 18 set and showing a new intensity in the development of its basic themes, along with a little Russian folk music to honor the composer’s patron.

Beethoven’s final years were marked by personal and physical problems, not the least of which was deafness. Yet his creative abilities were undiminished. During those years, says Jordan, “he tries to break free of every possible mold that hemmed him in to that point. It’s a fascinating process, really, to watch happen.”

Beethoven died just months after completing the E Minor quartet. At face value, it’s the simplest of the late quartets — in Jordan’s terms, “tremendously concentrated writing,” which perhaps is something impending death does for an artist. Though the shortest, it’s representative of the late quartets in its fragmentary, almost impressionistic quality, and in harmonic combinations that, to Jordan’s mind, anticipated much modern music.

And so there’s no more fitting way for the DaPontes to mark the passage between millennia (and into their 10th season) than with music so exalted and enduring. “I’ve been building up to this for 30 years,” Jordan says. “I know what I’m playing here. It’s just a privilege to be able to do it, and I’d do it no matter what, because I can and because I have to. And I think all my colleagues feel the same way.”n

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net..