The Usual Suspects

Box score:
1st. Poiesis Quartet
2nd. Arete Quartet
3rd. Quartet KAIRI

And so it's over. A couple hours after the end of last night's final concert of the Banff International String Quartet Competition with all the competitors, the three finalists were announced. (The one time I saw this happen in person, the director just got up before a microphone at the campus bistro, where a lot of us were hanging out for the evening.) That led to a concert this afternoon with each of the three finalists taking a long set, and then after a couple more hours of cogitation, the formal announcement of the three-place results, this one on the concert hall stage with a lot of applause and handing out of certificates.

In past years, the finalist round has consisted of a full performance of a major Beethoven or Schubert quartet, but this year they moved the ad lib round into that place. Each finalist had 45 minutes to play whatever they wanted for string quartet, subject only to the provisios that 1) they had to include at least three different composers, 2) at least full movements, no excerpts, 3) nothing they'd previously played during the festival, 4) though they could choose works by any connecting principle or none, they had to write an essay explaining why they'd made that selection. These essays were distributed to the in-person audience as program inserts, but if they made it onto the website, I couldn't find it.

So here are the finalists, what I thought of their earlier performances, what they played in the finalist round and how it came out.

First place, winner of the 2025 competition, is the Poiesis Quartet, and I have to say I'm very pleased. I thought they were by far the best of the three finalists. Particularly fine were their outstanding Brahms and extremely good Bartók. I also liked their playful Haydn and their dramatic Beethoven. The only thing I found disappointing was their 21st century selection, which they may have played well but which was not interesting music. They were at least the most interesting looking of all the competitors. They eschewed standard concert wear entirely, and their dress and grooming were ... well, this photo gives a good idea. They also use more gender-neutral pronouns than all the other competitors put together. They're Americans who are all graduates of the Oberlin Conservatory, and it's been suggested they may have picked up some of their style there, or maybe that's the appeal that's the reason they went there.

Poiesis's finalist recital was also all living 21st century composers, but it came out very differently from the earlier round. All four of these works were very interesting, even at times captivating, if not ingratiating. Two of them were basically quiet. Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a composer of the Chickasaw Nation, whose work I've heard done by the Oakland Symphony. His Pisachi has some fast and dramatic sections, but is mostly slow held notes with a strong folk flavor perhaps inherited from the composer's people. An even more hushed piece titled Phosphorescent Sea was well described by its title. Its composer was Joe Hisaishi, much older than the other composers on Poiesis's list and best known as the house composer for Hayao Miyazaki's films. Brian Raphael Nabors, an African-American composer who's also going to be done by Oakland, offered the first faster piece, a quartet that's brisk and snappy, bristling with colorful effects. The Seventh Quartet by Kevin Lau, Canadian of Chinese birth, was also fast and lively if less colorful than Nabors. These were all strongly and intelligently played and well sold by the Poiesis Quartet.

Second place goes to the Arete Quartet, two women and two men from Korea. They did a fine Schumann, and I also liked their clean and elegant Haydn. They did a lively job on their 21st century selection, but I disliked the piece. But I found their Schubert wanting in coherence and their Berg bloodless and enervating; they got very bad ratings from me for those.

For the finalist round, Arete picked a more conventional 20C program, Britten's Three Divertimenti and the same Janáček First Quartet that Kairi and Cong already did. Arete went even further than Cong on this one, building up the dissonant squawks and sounding as if the consonant passages existed only to increase the contrast. And to provide a third composer, Arete played the Mozart movement whose weird introduction gives the K. 465 quartet the nickname "Dissonant."

Third place goes to Quartet KAIRI, which I'm not going to use the capital letters on all the time. This group consists of four men. They're Japanese or Chinese by origin, but they're all studying in Salzburg now, so they consider that their home base. Their best performance was their thick and resonant Haydn; they won a special prize for the best Haydn performance of the round. Their Mendelssohn and Schubert seemed to me adequate but not the outstanding work you expect here, and their Janáček First was the opposite of Arete, attempting to dampen down the dissonance in defiance of the composer's intent. Their 21C piece was a piece of retro modernism of the sort I find undesirable.

Kairi's finalist round, like Arete's, consisted of two standard 20th century works leavened with a little Mozart. One of the pieces was Landscape by Toru Takemitsu, whose shows its old modernist character by making its sound sheets full of stringent dissonance. Tate and Hisaishi don't do that. More to my taste was Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, but I had a harder time parsing their slow and gentle approach to the outer movements. The Mozart was two movements from K. 575, one of the Prussian Quartets.