Childhoods Had Strings Attached

Some fathers indoctrinate their sons with football, some with cars. For Daniel and Todd Phillips, it was string quartet music.

“From an early age, we were instilled with a love of quartet playing and string playing in general,” said Dan Phillips. “For a string player, playing in a string quartet is the greatest possible thing you can do.”

It’s not too surprising, since dad in this case is a violinist who played for years in the Pittsburgh Symphony.

“He also had a string quartet,” Dan said by phone recently from his home in Brooklyn. “He included me as second violinist when I was in high school. When I left home, my little brother, Todd, took my place.”

The Phillips brothers are together in the Orion String Quartet, which plays works by Beethoven, Bartok and Dvorak tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. The program is sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

The brothers trade off playing first and second violins on the program. Todd, 34, will be first in Beethoven’s Quartet in D, Opus 18, No. 3, and Bartok’s Quartet No. 2. Dan will be first violinist in Dvorak’s Quartet in G, Opus 106.

“Beethoven is still the anchor of the repertory,” Dan said, “though for Beethoven this is one of his lighter ones. We recently did a whole Bartok cycle in Santa Fe. The Bartok Second is left over from that.

“The Dvorak G major is neglected, but I don’t know why,” he added. “It’s pretty epic in length, 35 to 37 minutes. It’s really kind of symphonic. Some of the themes are not as catchy perhaps. The slow movement is as good as anything he wrote. . . . It’s a gem. When we rehearse, not eight bars go by without someone saying, ‘That’s really cool.’ ”

Currently quartet-in-residence of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Orion is “not a young quartet,” Phillips said.

“This is our eighth season. We’re not yet another new young quartet on the scene, which is the perception. We all have had extensive solo and teaching careers, long before we ever had a quartet. We’re not novices by any means.”

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The group includes violist Steven Tenenbom and cellist Timothy Eddy. They picked their name without any particular meaning.

“We had to pick one,” Phillips said. “Like everyone else, we looked through names of painters, musicians, all the funny names that were easy to think of. We thought of stars. Orion was tolerable and easy to spell. It also looks good. But it has no significance. Most quartets will tell you the same thing.”

They do, however, draw a distinction between their philosophy about music and that of some other groups.

“Rather than working from the outside in to make sure that technically all our notes match, we take it from the point of view of: How does a phrase move? Where is the music moving to or from? What motivates the music? When we agree on what motivates the music, it’s on the edge, really together. It’s not solid and stiff.”

That also means the group’s rehearsal process is “always in flux. Whenever someone has a suggestion and someone else has a different suggestion, usually what comes out is not one or the other. Perhaps in concert something else comes out. . . . Because the process is fluid, it never gets boiled down to my way or your way.”

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Some groups, he said, “abandon musicianship so that it sounds better. There is this terrible concern to get it cosmetically all right and sound like other people’s records. Standards are so high. If we do that, one of us always blows the whistle. So we go back to working from the motivational point of view.

“Having high standards is good, especially high artistic standards,” he said. “But sometimes the pressure to play perfectly makes a lot of extra pressure. Everyone has always wanted to play perfectly throughout history. That’s nothing really new. But especially with records, now it’s possible to make things sound perfect so there’s this extra pressure.

“Say, for instance, in a moment of musical abandon, I hit a real clinker. A reviewer will write: ‘They had had a lot of feeling, but had intonation problems in the last movement which marred the performance.’

“A reviewer’s going to pick up on that note. . . . So there’s that pressure to play it safe next time. Nail the damn note. If the whole group sounds crummy all the time, that’s not good either. So that’s the kind of pressure that’s on out there, which isn’t great.”

* The Orion String Quartet will play works by Beethoven, Bartok and Dvorak tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $14 to $25. The program is sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. (714) 854-4646.