Гуарнери квартеті: Тарихы мен мұрасы

The Guarneri Quartet was an American string quartet founded in 1964 at the Marlboro Music School and Festival. It was admired for its rich, warm, complex tone and its bold, dramatic interpretations of the quartet literature, with a particular affinity for the works of Beethoven and Bartók. Through teaching at Harpur College (which became Binghamton University), University of Maryland, Curtis Institute of Music, and at Marlboro, the Guarneri players helped nurture interest in quartet playing for a generation of young musicians. The group's extensive touring and recording activities, coupled with its outreach efforts to engage audiences, contributed to the rapid growth in the popularity of chamber music during the 1970s and 1980s. The quartet is notable for its longevity: the group performed for 45 years with only one personnel change, when cellist David Soyer retired in 2001 and was replaced by his student Peter Wiley. The Guarneri Quartet disbanded in 2009.

Despite the group's name, only one instrument made by the celebrated Guarneri family of Cremona was played for any significant time by a member of the quartet: for many years David Soyer used an Andrea Guarneri cello made in 1669. He later switched to a Gagliano cello made in Naples in 1778. After trying several violins (including a Guarneri), Steinhardt settled on a Cremona instrument made by Lorenzo Storioni in the late 18th century. Dalley plays a French violin made in 1810 by Nicholas Lupot. In the quartet's early years Tree played a viola (patterned after Andrea Guarneri's "Conte Vitale") made by Harvey Fairbanks, a luthier from Binghamton, New York. Later, his primary instrument became a 1750 viola made by Dominicus Busan of Venice; he also plays a modern instrument made by Hiroshi Iizuka. Wiley plays a cello made around 1700 by Matteo Goffriller of Venice. At one point in the mid 1990s the quartet was offered the extended loan of a set of four rare Stradivarius instruments owned by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C. After considering the offer, the Guarneri musicians declined, preferring to play the instruments each had chosen for himself. Steinhardt has compared the task of finding a violin well matched to a performer's style to that of finding a spouse, and he adds, "After much trial and error, each of us has found what could aptly be called his musical soul mate."

Steinhardt, Dalley, Tree and Soyer coalesced into the Guarneri Quartet at the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Marlboro VT, where all of them spent summers during the early 1960s. During the summers of 1962 and 1963, the four played chamber music together in various permutations, and with encouragement from Festival director Rudolf Serkin and from Alexander Schneider (second violinist of the Budapest String Quartet) the new quartet was launched on 20 July 1964 with a concert at Nantucket, Massachusetts. The name Guarneri was suggested by Boris Kroyt (violist of the Budapest String Quartet), who had played with a short lived group of that name in Germany before World War II. In the fall of 1964, the quartet began a four year residency at Harpur College (now known as Binghamton University) in Binghamton, New York, where they taught advanced students, held a series of open rehearsals, and played 15 public concerts per year. Steinardt relates that the group found the situation attractive because Binghamton was within driving distance of their base in New York City, and it would provide an opportunity to rapidly build a repertoire, gain performing experience, and develop working relationships among themselves. The Guarneri's New York City debut took place on 28 February 1965 at the New School for Social Research as part of a concert series arranged by Alexander Schneider. The enthusiastic audience included Fritz Steinway, of the concert management firm Judson, O’Neill, Beall and Steinway (which would shortly become the group's manager) and Max Wilcox, a record producer for RCA Victor, who quickly secured a recording contract for the Guarneri. Soon afterward, the group replaced the retiring Budapest String Quartet in a series of concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Arta series that extended across the Guarneri's lifespan, ending only when the quartet disbanded in 2009. They appeared at the Mostly Mozart Festival beginning in 1966, and an ongoing series at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall began in 1975. Other frequent New York venues included the Frick Collection, the 92nd Street Y, Rockefeller University and Washington Irving High School. The Guarneri began touring almost immediately, with a concert in Cleveland on 20 April 1965. In the summer of that year they embarked upon their first European tour, performing in Geneva, Basel, Amsterdam, Cologne, and at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. As the quartet's reputation grew, both domestic and international tours became a way of lifeoften a grueling one. Ruttencutter documents examples of their schedules in the period around the late 1970s: in the fall of 1977, for example, they performed in 21 American cities, in addition to playing half a dozen New York concerts; in 1981 they were scheduled for 18 European concerts within 20 days. Over the course of its career, the quartet also performed in Mexico, South America, Australia, China and Japan. In the early years they played as many as 130 concerts per year, although by the 1980s they were attemptingnot always successfullyto limit their appearances to 100 per year. While the members of the quartet unanimously and emphatically preferred live performances to studio recordings, they were, from the beginning, prolific recording artists. Their first session for RCA Victor took place in June 1965, and included quartets by Mozart, Dvořák and Mendelssohn. Steinhardt’s book devotes chapter 7 to the group’s experiences making recordings, and their mixed feelings about the process and its results. By 1998 the Guarneri's catalog exceeded 50 LPs and CDs, including numerous recordings with pianist Arthur Rubenstein. A partial discography can be found below. The Guarneri musicians were active in teaching throughout the quartet's life. The affiliation with Harpur College continued until 1968, and in that year Steinhardt, Tree and Soyer were appointed to the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. David Soyer, who was about a dozen years older than his colleagues, retired in 2001, and his place was taken by Peter Wiley, Soyer's former student. The transition was symbolized in a Carnegie Hall concert that year, in which the Guarneri performed the Beethoven Quartet in B flat major, op. 130, with Soyer playing cello, followed by the String Quintet in C by Schubert, with Soyer and Wiley taking the two cello parts. For some of the final concerts, David Soyer rejoined the Guarneri as the group once again played the Schubert Quintet in C, which is scored for two cellos.

Unlike most performing ensembles, the Guarneri permitted, and even encouraged, public awareness of their work as they prepared concerts, and they allowed backstage glimpses of the interpersonal dynamics within the group. From the beginning they conducted "genuine" open rehearsals, in which audiences could listen as they argued over the best way to play a passage or whether a piece they were considering ought to become part of their repertoire. They frequently held interactive sessions with audiences The group insisted that all of the players were equals, and as a symbol of this, determined that whenever a piece called for one violin (for example, a piano quartet), second violinist John Dalley would play that part unless he chose not to do so. Similarly, all decisions were to be made by the group as a wholeand since four is an even number, that stance guaranteed a great deal of discussion when two members favored one option and two others preferred a different one. Dalley expressed the group's position as follows:<blockquote>You have to be able to bend or give up some of your ideas. If you don't compensate and give in and compromise, you just don't get along. I think we had four strong personalities, and that's good. It's one way for a quartet to mature. The other way is to have a dictator who rules over the other three. That's the way it was in Europe, but Americans don't like that. It works faster, but the democratic way is more satisfying. No point was too small for debate: in musical notation, a dot over a note means that it should be played staccato, and Steinhardt describes one public rehearsal in which the group argued for 20 minutes over precisely how much shortening one particular staccato marked note ought to have. In general majority opinions prevailed, but a minority voice was listened to, and occasionally when one member had extremely strong feelings on a matter, he was allowed veto power. When the group's decision process hit a deadlock, they would sometimes play the passage one way for a Monday concert and a different way on Tuesday. cf. Steinhardt 101. An amusing extreme was a concert in which the others disliked the tempo set by Tree for the final movement of a Beethoven quartet, and when it was over, after emphatic argument in the wings between bows, the group returned to the stage and played the movement at a faster pace as an encore. The players came to accept and expect the constant flow of criticism without resentment, and the rehearsals were also laced with friendly banter and corny jokes. But praise was almost never expressed; Steinhardt describes the Guarneri as a "compliment free zone," noting that this reduced competitiveness and eliminated any pressure to offer congratulations in return. However, the frequency and intensity with which the players had to work together forced them to adopt measures to preserve their individual identities and maintain some degree of personal privacy. They seldom socialized outside of concert related events, and while touring they often made independent travel and hotel arrangements. They would frequently split up during off days while on tour, and consciously avoided asking about the activities of the others. Dalley was particularly elusive outside of work hours, and Steinhardt reports that "Where’s John?" was a frequent question while the group was travelling. Once when the quartet had two days off between concerts in Florida, Dalley disappeared, leaving behind the impression that he was going to visit relatives in Orlando. Eventually he revealed that he had flown back to his New Jersey home to strip the linoleum from his kitchen floor, returning to Florida in time for the next concert. The musicians maintained a firewall between the quartet's activities and their family lives, and summers were protected as Guarneri free time. The devices the players used to resolve problems and maintain their personal privacy, combined with their genuine fondness for each other and for the music they played, made possible an unusually long life for the quartet. The four original musicians performed together for 37 consecutive years, "a remarkable record of longevity for a string quartet, in which tensions over music making, money and personal differences often cause breakups." The quartet's longevity, along with the readily available material about the group's interpersonal dynamics, has made it possible for the Guarneri to be used as a model in studies and pedagogy regarding collaborative leadership.

There were only about a dozen American string quartets in 1964 when the Guarneri was born. Just 16 years later, there were over 250. While that growth cannot be attributed to any single cause, the Guarneri is frequently cited as a significant force assisting the boom. James Reel quotes a Curtis student's thoughts:<blockquote>
"There was always an excitement in the air at Curtis when they were about to show up," recalls Lucy Chapman Stoltzman, who studied particularly with Steinhardt, often in lessons lasting more than two hours "It was the pure beauty of their sound and legato, and the sense of the inner voices was so strong, the sense of every voice being important in the way you want it to be," she says. "The Guarneri brought it to some new level that I hadn't heard before." In the wake of their success, however, other musicians have been able to launch new quartets with more confidence that they can make a living playing chamber music, and by commanding significant fees, the Guarneri raised the payment baseline for all string quartets. Finally, the Guarneri helped to build public awareness of chamber music, and thus increase demand for it. Their eagerness to communicate with their audiences, their interviews, open rehearsals, question and answer sessions all helped to make string quartets less esoteric, more familiar to listeners. Helen Drees Ruttencutter put it this way:They are said to have done for quartet music in America what Leonard Bernstein did for symphonic music – made it accessible and appealing to everyone open to a new musical experience. Audiences get a quadruple dose of what many managers consider one of the most important elements for a career in music: charisma. They have been hailed all over the world as "the Great American Quartet of the era" and "the greatest string quartet in the world."

1989: High Fidelity – The Guarneri String Quartet, directed and produced by Allan Miller.

David Blum (1986). The Art of Quartet Playing: The Guarneri Quartet in Conversation with David Blum, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. I. Fink & C. Merriell with the Guarneri String Quartet (1985). String Quartet Playing, New Jersey: Paganiniana Publications, Inc.
Helen Drees Ruttencutter (1980). Quartet: a Profile of the Guarneri Quartet. New York. Lippincott & Crowell Publishers. Arnold Steinhardt (1998). Indivisible by Four: A String Quartet in Pursuit of Harmony, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. .