Conversation of Strings

The four men worked in shirtsleeves, practicing alone on the barren stage, rigid on their chairs, laboring in total concentration to draw from their instruments the warm, expressive voices that exemplify the string quartet. They moved quickly through the music, sel dom speaking, marking cues in their scores, skipping past the easy to bear down on the difficult. Then, with only a brief break to relax from the tension of the severe rehearsal, the Juilliard String Quartet strode to center stage at the Tanglewood Theater-Concert Hall last week, greeted a rapt audience with deep bows, and presented a program of contemporary chamber music played with a unity of excellence that is matchless in the world today.

Parlor Talk. The Juilliard is now 17 years old, and its reputation is safely established. Only the aging and conservative Budapest String Quartet approaches Juilliard's mastery of the quartet repertory, but in modern music Juilliard's technique and understanding are unique. The nature of the string quartet inevitably suggests a conversation, and the Juilliard players have an agility and intelligence that pitch and color the tone of each voice to enrich the spirit of the composer. Their Mozart is 18th century parlor talk, Beethoven can sound like stentorian and political argument, Bartok and Schoenberg are full of menacing whispers and terrified screams.

To achieve the musical and personal rapport that such expressiveness requires, the players cultivate an emotional generosity toward one another that reminds them all of a good marriage. First Violinist Robert Mann, 43, and Violist Raphael Hillyer, 49, charter members of the quartet, are a perfect match for musicmaking--Mann the easy, natural leader, Hillyer the intense, nervous brooder. Second Violinist Isidore Cohen, 40, who joined in 1958, seldom speaks except when spoken to--a towering virtue in a second violinist --and Cellist Claus Adam, 45, is also an ideal man for his instrument--a calm, stable, reassuring anchorman.

Stubborn Argument. "When we're pressed for time, we let one of us call the shots," says Cohen, "but when we have the time, we each contribute our one-quarter." Argument over interpretation occasionally reaches an impasse, but the quartet solves such problems by playing a piece differently from night to night until all agree on one idea. "It's a knockdown, drag-out battle sometimes," Hillyer says, but they always resolve their differences.

On matters of repertory, the quartet is happily united behind the principle that it adopted at its founding in 1946: that it should serve all music while retaining a special interest in modern works. In its early years, it championed the works of Bartok and Schoenberg particularly, and it has played premieres of some of the best chamber music written in this century--notably the second quartets of Elliott Carter and Alberto Ginastera. Such missionary work has helped to stimulate a widening revival of interest in chamber music, and the Juilliard (which receives at least one new composition a week from hopeful composers) takes .paternal delight in the growing number of string quartets around the country. Fear of competition--at their lofty level--never enters their minds.

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