In the course of just a couple of years, a young French ensemble, the Quatuor Ebene (or, in English, the Ebony Quartet) has become big news on the classical scene. They've been known to modestly call themselves "freelance players," but not just any freelance players win Gramophone Magazine's highly sought-after Record of the Year prize, as they did in 2009 for their album of Ravel, Debussy, and Faure, nor do they become eagerly anticipated featured artists at Lincoln Center, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, the Verbier Festival, and Vienna's Konzerthaus; next season, they will have their own residency at London's Wigmore Hall.
Given how quickly and thoroughly the Ebene players--violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure, violist Mathieu Herzog, and cellist Raphael Merlin--have seized the international spotlight, it's rather hard to remember that their New York debut came just last year with a gig at the downtown club (Le) Poisson Rouge; last week at Lincoln Center's Stanley Kaplan Penthouse found the quartet playing Mozart and Beethoven in a late-night concert.
Although the Kaplan Penthouse is meant to be a more relaxed, club-like setting for small-scaled performances, with the audience sitting at cafe tables and enjoying glasses of complimentary wine, the atmosphere at the Ebene concert was so highly charged, and the listeners so attentive, that not a single whisper, cough, or chair scrape could be heard over the course of the entire performance--a singular enough event for the notoriously passive-aggressive New York audience, but all the more remarkable given the weightiness of the program, which paired Mozart's youthful and freewheeling Divertimento in D, K. 136, with one of the most emotionally demanding works in the repertoire, Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, which unfolds over seven continuous movements. What they achieved was a remarkable blend of seeming spontaneity and red-hot intensity, with a maturity that belied their years.
Earlier that same evening, I sat down with Colombet and Le Magadure to discuss the Ebene Quartet's artistic vision and approach to musicianship, in which their interest spreads far beyond the traditional repertoire, and what drew them initially to specialize in chamber music, given its reputation (warranted or not) as a rather forbidding form.
"When I was young, I wanted to be a soloist," observed Colombet, "but then I thought I didn't have the technical capability for that. So I started thinking about chamber music--and the string quartet is, I think, a perfect balance between being a soloist and playing in an orchestra. Most importantly--you're not alone, not when you're playing, and not when you're on the road. I've often thought about how lonely it must be for soloists, doing all that traveling all by themselves."
"But also," said Le Magadure, "the string quartet dynamic really is why so many great composers--Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven--loved writing for this grouping so much." He believes that even with the textural similarities between violin, viola, and cello, the string quartet is also the perfect vehicle for their explorations in genres other than classical music.
"I always think of a string quartet as a mini-band, too. You can be everything--drummer, guitarist, singer, whatever," mused Le Magadure. "And from that mindset, we started to play jazz too. We all loved music other than classical anyway. Raphael used to be a jazz pianist, Pierre had a rock band, Mathieu was in a funk and soul band, and I played bass and drums. At the end of our rehearsals, we would just relax by playing other things--standards, pop tunes, whatever. And we realized that all that was part of what we wanted to do as a quartet. Everything is mixed these days anyway, right? I mean, think of Radiohead, Muse, Gotan Project, Prince, Sting--none of those artists belong to just one genre. I mean, Sting: at this point, he's as knowledgeable about early music as can be."
Even this quartet's name points to their extra-classical interests--and that was their intention from the very start. "We knew from the beginning that we didn't want to go down the traditional route of naming ourselves after some composer or some visual artist; that is so restrictive. 'Ebene' is just the French word for ebony," Le Magadure explained. "So of course ebony refers to the wood of our instruments. But we also meant it to reflect a second meaning: a love and respect we had for the great African-American jazz musicians. We wanted to pay homage to them, but also show our audiences from the very start that we wanted to play that music as well." (Considering that France was at one time far more warmly receptive to African-American musicians than white American audiences were in the early decades of the 20th century, and particularly after World War II, such an affinity seems organic.) But don't think that this foursome is overtly thinking about marketing concerns when they play music from outside the strictly classical fold.
"'Crossover' is such a meaningless word at this point," said Colombet. "It can mean a really wonderful coming together of styles, but it can also mean projects that feel very artificial, like the artists are trying to get to a particular audience in a very calculated way. We don't like that."
However, Le Magadure, hastened to add, it wouldn't hurt if their forthcoming album for Virgin Classics, due to be released in spring 2011, helps bring a younger audience to hear them play Ravel or Faure. Titled "Fiction," it will feature collaborations with soprano and label mate Natalie Dessay, jazz vocalist Stacey Kent, Spanish pop singer Luz Casal, and French actress Fanny Ardant, in everything from a cover of the American classic "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" to the Beatles' "Come Together" to what's become something of the signature tune for "the other Ebene," as they like to call their extra-classical outings: the tune "Misirlou," which is now best known from Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction. Another film-derived Ebene staple, by the way, is "Someday My Prince Will Come" from Disney's iconic Snow White--which they sweetly and rather earnestly sing as an a capella vocal quartet before picking up their instruments.
"We did some concerts in Berlin a while ago," Colombet remembered. "The first night we played at a famous jazz club there called the A-Trane. The second night we played at the Berliner Philharmonie, which is just about as classical as you can get. As it turned out, a bunch of people who hadn't intended to come hear us at the Philharmonie turned up at that second classical concert, just because they had enjoyed hearing us the night before so much. So maybe that is an avenue to getting people to hearing classical music."
"Maybe the problem is with our generation," remarked Colombet. "Older people got exposure to classical music at school. Little kids might never have heard classical music before, but they don't have any negative preconceptions about it. Earlier in this tour, we played some school events out in Washington and Oregon, and the little kids were literally running after our car when we were leaving, asking for more. So maybe it's just that we have to convince people our own age that Beethoven has more energy and more inside it than Metallica or Kiss, as much as we love them too!"
Here's a really interesting (if lengthy) video the quartet made about the recording process for their album of Ravel, Debussy & Faure, which went on to win the Gramophone Recording of the Year Award last year:
For a taste of the "other Ebene," check out a live performance of "Misirlou" that they did at the Verbier Festival in 2008:
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The Ebene Quartet's Playlist
Ariama asked the violinists of the Ebene Quartet: What other quartets do you admire? Their answers:
- The Quartetto Italiano for their warm, rich sound. It's unbelievable.
- The Lindsays for their artistic choices, and their engagement with the audience--no doubt. They deserved to be far more famous.
- For Brahms, absolutely the Amadeus Quartet.
- For Beethoven, the Alban Berg Quartet, no doubt.
- For technical perfection, the Artemis Quartet, the Hagen Quartet, and the Borodin String Quartet.
For the complete guide to the Ebene Quartet's recommendations, click here.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
