Guarneri Quartet – Photo © Dorothea von Haeften
I’m out of town this week, and so have missed my chance to hear the Guarneri Quartet for one last time. I’ve heard some later performances, and sure, the group has succombed to the ravages of age to some extent. But their musicianship has never faltered. I would listen to the Guarneri foursome play late Beethoven over any other group, alive or dead. In my opinion, as a person who was in the Guarneri Graduate Fellowship program at University of Maryland and saw them concertize and rehearse dozens and dozens of times, they are perhaps the finest quartet on the planet, especially at the height of their technical prowess. In particular, their second cycle of Beethoven string quartets holds so many revelations and moments of breathtaking beauty – the beklemmt passage from the Cavatina of Op. 130 never fails to cause my breath to catch in my throat. Arnold Steinhardt is a god. John Dalley is the gold standard by which second violinists in string quartets should be judged – just pushy enough, with a rich, supportive sound, and a sixth-sense about what Arnie was about to do at all times. Michael Tree, he’ll go down in the pantheon of great quartet violists – of all violists, in fact – and he’s played every piece in the literature on a giant, amazing viola that would have crippled most of the rest of us years ago. David Soyer, laid down the bass line like no one else in the business, and made the most awkward passages in the repertoire sound effortless and sublime.
It will be hard to imagine a world without the GQ – they’re a national treasure. Everything they ever recorded is worth listening to, even if you don’t end up agreeing with their interpretive choices. Because those choices make you think about what you would do, and what the composer intended, and they make the string quartet literature a canon as deep and dramatic as the complete works of Shakespeare. They will be missed.