Celebrating LA From Mount Wilson’s Vantage Point

The lights of Los Angeles glow against the night sky from the vantage point of the “monastery,”
the astronomers’ accommodation at Mount Wilson Observatory.

REVIEW

The Zelter String Quartet play Todd Mason and Beethoven

DAVID J BROWN

I was particularly sorry to have missed the July event in this summer’s bumper season of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome at Mount Wilson Observatory (season preview here). Some of LA’s finest musicians, led by cellist Cécilia Tsan, Artistic Director of the series and joint mastermind behind it in tandem with Mount Wilson Trustee Dan Kohne, had been joined—in a program of Schumann, Beethoven, and John Williams—by the astronaut violinist Sarah Gillis on the 56th anniversary of the first Moon landing.

However, if that concert had its focus firmly upwards, not only towards the Moon but also the recent Polaris Dawn mission in which Ms. Gillis memorably played “Rey’s Theme” from Wlliams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens score accompanied by groups of musicians electronically linked from around the world, then the most recent, on the first Sunday in August, could be said to have turned its gaze, at least for part of the time, downward to the city spread out on the plain nearly a mile below the Observatory’s mountain fastness.

City of Angels, a homage by LA composer Todd Mason (left) to the city of his birth and present domicile, has had a slightly complicated history. Originally conceived as his Fourth String Quartet, Mason’s reworking for string orchestra (which can be heard on YouTube) acquired the title City of Angels. At Mount Wilson the latest version of the quartet, into which he carried over those minor revisions as well as the title, received its world premiere by the Zelter String Quartet (Kyle Gilner and Gallia Kastner, violins; Carson Rick, viola; and Allan Hon, cello).

Individually and collectively these marvelous young musicians are familiar both at Mount Wilson (LA Opus review here) and at other local chamber music venues, including Mason’s own House Concerts, and judging by that previous Mount Wilson premiere—of his String Quartet No. 3—and the present performance, they are at once au fait with the idiom and up to its considerable technical challenges.

In contrast to Quartet No. 3’s extensive single-movement structure, City of Angels is in three separate movements representing aspects of Los Angeles: Restless City, Dream City, and Irrepressible City. Rather than the overall “fast / slow / fast” arrangement one might expect, “slow(ish) / slow / (very) fast” overall describes their pacing more accurately; tellingly though, Mason’s own indications—Pensive, Expressive, and Festive & Fast!—say more about mood than motion alone.

Restless City certainly is just that, but the Zelters proved themselves masters of its twists and turns: constant changes of time signature, abrupt loud/soft, soft/loud dynamic switches, and sudden rapid-fire attacks and intervallic leaps, though perhaps its most ear-catching feature is the frequent slurring from one dissonant chord to another, which could well be heard as a musical metaphor for the treacherously unstable ground upon which LA is built.

With the four instruments muted throughout, Dream City could also have been headed Pensive, and at this movement’s opening Mason affords each player an opportunity to shine, with eloquent, slow-moving solos seamlessly handed forward one to the next: in particular 1st violin Gallia Kastner added some wonderfully expressive nuance here. Textures thicken and the music rises to brief forte climaxes, but the somewhat bleak introspection is never far away before the music settles to a final long-held chord of rare warmth.

Irrepressible City is a concise rondo, played here with whiplash fervor by the Zelters. Recurrences of its punchy opening section are punctuated by brief returns to the inquietude of the earlier movements, and this finale is also permeated throughout by the metrical restlessness that particularly characterized the first movement though was also present in the second, if less marked there due to the slower speeds.

If I have a concern, it’s that the City of Angels title could be taken to signal a more lightweight, illustrative piece than it actually is—just a sidebar to an increasingly impressive sequence of numbered string quartets (Mason has already complete the Fifth, likely to be heard in his House Concerts next year). But no breezy travelogue, this intricately wrought and intensely thought-through quartet is a worthy companion to its predecessors. Maybe the warmer, more upholstered timbres of the string orchestra version lend themselves better to the title.

"Beethoven nears the end," by Oswald Charles Barrett.

Either way, it says a lot for the technical mastery and expressive fervor of Mason’s quartet that it felt neither dwarfed nor sidelined when preceding one by the greatest exponent of the medium who ever lived.

Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat major, Op. 127, the first of the four mighty works that embodied his ever more original explorations during 1825 and 1826, is outwardly the most conventionally assembled of them, being in the usual four movements as opposed to, successively, the five, six, and seven of Quartets Nos. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, 13 in B-flat major, Op. 133, and 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131.

The trenchant Maestoso chords with which the first movement begins certainly sound like a grand portal opening onto a new expressive world, but what follows is anything but portentous. Beethoven promptly sideslips to an amiable little tune that introduces an elegant, economical, and slyly subversive take on the sonata design that in many previous works he had exploited with unprecedented structural resourcefulness and expressive power. At its pianissimo wisp of a close, after barely seven minutes, he leaves us still wondering what kind of a work this is.

But the theme-and-variations slow movement that follows is as expansive as the first was concise, and here the Zelters gave it all the expressive space that it needs, just as they had bodied forth so expertly the quicksilver twists and turns of its predecessor. The Vivace scherzo and the poundingly vigorous Finale both had all the requisite energy, but without compromising clarity even within the exceptionally resonant acoustic of the 100-inch telescope Dome. As with the Mason, the quartet played Beethoven's ever-challenging masterpiece (Gallia Kastner and Kyle Gilner here swapping their 1st/2nd violin roles) with all the expressive nuance it needs, as well as consummately tight rhythmic unity.

It was a pity, I thought, to omit the long second-half repeat in the scherzo, not only reducing the movement’s scale but rather deflating Beethoven’s joke at the end, where for a handful of Presto measures he seems about to bring back the pell-mell Trio section yet again (a trick he’d previously played in the scherzos of the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies), but it didn’t detract from the performance’s impact as the response of the audience made clear, many of whom doubtless were experiencing the magic of this unique venue for the first time.

Brief extracts from this concert can be enjoyed on YouTube here. The next in this season takes place on Sunday, August 19 with, as usual, two performances at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Cécilia Tsan will be joined by Evan Price (violin), Roch Lockyer (guitar and vocals), Zach Dellinger (viola), and Brian Netzley (bass) in a tribute to the violinist Ben Powell, who played in the very first concert of Mount Wilson's inaugural 2017 season, but died at the tragically young age of 38 in 2024.

 

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100-Inch Telescope Dome, Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunday 8 August 2025, 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Images: LA at night: author; The performance: Todd Mason; Beethoven: Oxford Companion to Music.