by Peter Feher
The Taplin Quartet, Cleveland’s newest chamber ensemble, gave its first local performance this month — and at the same time traveled to Europe, Asia, and Oceania. In fact, the group’s world tour brought along the entire audience at Dunham Tavern in Midtown on Sunday afternoon, February 8.
“From East to West,” the Quartet’s debut program — presented as part of Heights Arts’ Close Encounters concert series — took listeners on a musical trek across three continents while never straying too far from home.
It helped to be embarking with four familiar guides. Violinists Katherine Bormann and Zhan Shu, violist Gareth Zehngut, and cellist Martha Baldwin are all Cleveland Orchestra members, and together as the Taplin, they have the advantage of a shared starting point.
The skills essential for great orchestral playing — rhythmic precision, interpretive clarity, and a quick ability to adapt — were also what kept the Quartet confidently on course during Sunday’s performance.
In a humanities class at the Curtis Institute of Music in the 1980s, professor Joan Landis asked a young Robert Walters to do something he had never done before: read a poem aloud. It was Wallace Stevens’ 