Quartet in Residence

In linked sweetness long drawn out, the last bright notes of a Haydn string quartet drifted out of the hall. The first violinist stood up, walked to the center of the University of California's Wheeler Hall stage, and paused for quiet to make an announcement. "Last night," he said, "one of the greatest artists of quartet music, Robert Maas, died.* We owe him a tremendous debt . . . our next number will be in his memory." Then the four fiddlers of the Griller String Quartet played "Consummatum Est" from Haydn's Seven Words of Christ on the Cross; they played it with such intensity, and with so taut a rein on their emotion, that there was not even one absent-minded handclap from the 900 listeners.

It had been just 20 years since four teen-age students at London's Royal Academy of Music had gone together to a concert of Belgium's famed Pro Arte String Quartet, of which Maas was the cellist. They came away determined to form a quartet of their own. The four--Violinists Sidney Griller and Jack O'Brien, Cellist Colin Hampton and Violist Philip Burton--decided over a pint of beer that the way to become a quartet was to live together, break all family ties, refuse engagements to play separately.

They left the Academy, set up housekeeping in an abandoned box car on the south coast of England, rehearsed 14 to 16 hours a day. They found their vows hard to keep: to eat, all four played for a while in the orchestra of a Bea Lillie revue; and once for eight weeks two of them fiddled for the sound tracks of the first English talkies.

But the money they made bought them a year of rehearsal time. They played whenever & wherever they could, giving concerts in barns, corn exchanges and the homes of friends. They finally got to play the Mendelssohn Octet with the Pro Arte String Quartet ("they were the gods"). Says Griller: "We had terrific competition--the Budapest, the Busch, all the finest. But we worked our way, rather like worms." For a while they did not even have a name. "I had gone over to Ireland to visit my girl. When I got back, the other three told me they'd had to have some announcements made. 'We didn't have a name,' they said, 'so we used yours!' '

They toured Europe, playing nearly 1,000 concerts. When war came they joined the R.A.F. together, and were made the official R.A.F. Quartet. Besides playing in shelters, at airdromes and in factories, they played a command performance at Buckingham Palace, and at the Potsdam conference. U.S. critics, who first heard them on a 60-concert tour of the U.S. in 1939, generally rate them among the top four or five quartets playing in this country. No other major quartet has stayed together so long.

Last week Violinist Griller had some news that he did not tell the audience in Wheeler Hall: for the next three years, chamber music students at the University of California could watch and learn from the Griller String Quartet at work. The Griller would be the university's first "quartet in residence."

* Famed Cellist Maas, leader of the Paganini Quartet, had died a dozen or so miles away, at Oakland's Mills College, at the end of a concert.

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