MAJOR MINOR: Jupiter String Quartet

Watching resin fly is addictive

by John Petric for The Other Paper
Published: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 6:23 PM EST


Look out, my low-brow Cro-Magnon friends, string quartet-itis has struck again.
 
The, uh, band: the Jupiter String Quartet. The place: the intimate Southern Theatre. The material: Haydn, Janacek and Beethoven.
 
The result: freakin’ mind-blowing, particularly when the musicians tackled the last cat, whoever he was.
 
What I loved about the Ying Quartet a couple of weeks ago, I loved about the Jupiters. Namely, it was passionate from the first note on. And it wasn’t an ordinary, fake, Dave Matthews-style, emo-weenie passion, but a mind-body-wooden-instrument-and-horse-hair passion the likes of which you don’t see in most groups—except for every string quartet I’ve ever seen. Which is two now.
 
Opening with Haydn’s Quartet in F Minor, the quartet was conversational, alternately playful and serious, during the Moderato section, which was followed by the Minuet. But it was the Adagio section that breathed and sighed. Yes, the goddam Adagio took it home.
 
Haydn was pleasant enough, yepper. So pleasant that he left me totally unprepared for the mood swings of Janacek’s Kreutzer Sonata. The cello contributed deeply moving colors while the violins and viola mixed madness and melancholy. Soon the violins got even crazier, creating a tossing, roiling sea of frenetic insanity. So highly dramatic was Janacek’s Adagio, I thought it was the most intense classical music I’d ever heard—and it looked physically exhausting.
 
Amazingly enough, the Jupiters outdid Janacek with Beethoven’s Quartet in E-flat Major, and I’m telling you, Beethoven is the man! The musicians segued from a delicate, graceful sway to an interlude melancholy enough for a Cure fan. Yet ol’ Ludwig was hardly done.
 
Beethoven was a man of many moods, many of them more than slightly maniacal. Following his score, the musicians went at it like Teutonics battling the Romans in the wild woods of Bavaria. I mean, I heard the equivalent of Frank Zappa meeting the Allman Brothers doing speed versions of “Whippin’ Post,” after which the free jazz of Rahsaan Roland Kirk was thrown in, before everything did not level out as a variety of melodies floated into each other.
 
Four stringed instruments did all that, and it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard or seen. You’ve simply got to see a string quartet before you die.