Cypress String Quartet

Following three acclaimed releases for AVIE surveying works by Dvo?ák, Schubert and contemporary Americans, the San Francisco-based Cypress String Quartet turns to the seminal string quartets of Beethoven, performing the five quartets from the composer’s middle period. Formed in 1996, the Cypresses added Beethoven to their repertoire early on. Their signature sound, which is clear and transparent, built up from the bottom register and layered like a pyramid, lends itself beautifully to the Middle String Quartets – the three “Rasumovskys,” the “Harp,” and the “Serioso.”

I first heard the late string quartets of Beethoven in my teens, on a budget price LP on the French Musidisc label. I don’t remember much about the performances; one movement that sticks in my mind is the slow movement of Op. 127, which was played at an expansive tempo, and took around twenty minutes. However I do remember the liner-notes, which were obviously translated by someone for whom English was not their first language.

Composer Elena Ruehr has roots in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and studied with William Bolcom at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; the release of the Cypress String Quartet's How She Danced: String Quartets of Elena Ruehr finds Ruehr as a professor in the music department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Although not all of her four string quartets were written for it, Cypress String Quartet has enjoyed a long association with Ruehr going back at least to 1996, which is recapped to some extent in the engaging interview format booklet notes, led by Saint Paul Sunday Morning host Bill McGlaughlin and involving both the composer and all four members of Cypress.

The Cypress String Quartet, based out of San Francisco, CA, has been working on a series of recordings of the complete string quartets of Beethoven, with the quartet's first violinist, Cecily Ward, listed as producer of the recordings. This set of the op. 18 quartets fills out their recorded survey. Interestingly, the quartet essentially went in "reverse order" with respect to issuing their recordings, in that the op. 18 quartets are, of course, the earliest of the Beethoven quartets, but this 2-CD set is the last of the Cypress Quartet's recordings of the cycle to be issued. Their album of the late quartets was first, and the album of the middle quartets was, fittingly, in the middle.

The latest CD from composer Jay Cloidt features the premiere studio recordings of two ambitious and diverse works for string quartet, Spectral Evidence and eleven windows, performed by the Cypress String Quartet. Spectral Evidence begins with a straightforward performance of the first two minutes of the Mozart quartet (No. 14 in G, K. 387).

The threads that connect the string quartets on this "American album" by San Francisco's Cypress String Quartet are a little tenuous. The booklet speaks of the mixture of ethnic influences that has been characteristic of concert music in the U.S., but two of the works, Kevin Puts' Lento assai and Samuel Barber's String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, do not use ethnic materials at all.

Cellist Gary Hoffman joins the Cypress String Quartet in this 2013 rendition of Franz Schubert's String Quintet in C major, D. 956, one of the supreme masterpieces in chamber music. The performance on this release from Avie is energetic and passionate, and the listener becomes deeply engrossed from the outset because the highly expressive playing is immediately compelling.