A microphone fell from the ceiling of Smith Theater Saturday night during the Ying Quartet's performance of Leos Janacek's Quartet No. 2 ("Lettres Intimes"). The audience gasped and a quick-handed gentleman caught it before it could do any hurt.
But that was far from the only dramatic moment of the performance in the Candlelight Series at Columbia. Janacek's Quartet No. 2 is one of the most explosive, tender and ardent works in the chamber music repertory.
When he was 64, the Czech composer met and fell in love with Kamila Stosslova, a young Jewish woman who was already married. Janacek's passion for her burned brightly during the final 10 years of his life and helped to produce the masterpieces on which his reputation as one of the great composers of the 20th century rests. This is a piece of music that pushes emotions, as the program book noted, "beyond the limits of musical form." Listening to it is like overhearing a passionate conversation between two people who know that their love -- because of differences in age, the strictures of society and their own decency -- will never be consummated.
It is impossible to imagine that "Lettres Intimes" could have been played better than it was by the Ying Quartet; their insight into the music's private utterances shone on every page. This quartet composed of three brothers and a sister -- violinists Timothy Ying and Janet Ying, violist Philip Ying and cellist David Ying -- played together as children in Winetka, Ill., were educated together at the Eastman School and coached there by the great Cleveland Quartet, and won the Naumburg Award last year. No young quartet (the players are still in their 20s) has impressed this listener so much since the debut of the Cleveland 25 years ago. Their playing is beautiful, imaginative, exciting and -- despite the genuinely familial closeness of their ensemble -- strikingly individualistic.
The Yings performed Schubert's early Quartet in G minor in a manner that honored its Haydnesque scale, while taking note of the then 18-year-old composer's occasional excursions into uncharted territory. And their reading of Beethoven's ineffably beautiful late Quartet in C-sharp Minor was masterly. This was not simply a polished reading by four young virtuosos. The music's seven movements over its 40-minute length had enormous note-to-note tensile strength. And, as they did in the Janacek work, the Yings made listeners feel as though they were privileged eavesdroppers upon one of music's most private and profound discourses.