Music: The Bang-Bang Quartet

When they came clattering into town after town in two dusty Mercedes, a Renault and a Citroen, the visitors from America looked more like a wandering minstrel show than a first-class string quartet. The cars sagged with musical scores and books, the roofs were piled high with luggage. Crammed in with the musicians and wives were eight children of assorted ages. But when they turned up in white tie and tails to play at the Tel Aviv Museum last week, the members of Chicago’s Fine Arts Quartet won the same kind of tumultuous reception they have encountered everywhere on their three-month odyssey through Europe and Israel. Said one Tel Aviv critic: “This is the best thing we’ve had from America.” It took a while for the quartet to prove its class to European audiences. Although the four members—Cellist George Sopkin, 44, First Violinist Leonard Sorkin, 43, Second Violinist Abram Loft, 38, Violist Irving Ilmer, 40—had toured the Continent briefly two years ago, they found on this trip that Europeans are still apt to think of Chicago as a breeding ground of gangsters rather than musicians. In Stuttgart a jovial German musician learned where they were from and greeted them by shouting, “Bang, bang, bang!” In Karlsruhe, West Germany, their hotel manager watched suspiciously as their caravan arrived, later spotted drip-dry shirts hanging on lines in their rooms and stomped off muttering, “Gypsies!” But as they made their gypsy-like way through 55 concerts in eleven countries—eating picnic lunches, staying in the cheapest hotels, often sleeping in their cars—their reputation grew and preceded them.

“One is struck,” said Geneva’s Le Courrier, “by the extraordinary ensemble of these four musicians who have come from Chicago with something other than corned beef in their suitcases.” Wrote Amsterdam’s Het Vrije Volk: “The highest praise can scarcely suffice . . . They have made us aware that along with the harshly materialistic, there is another America.” In Braunschweig, West Germany, the Goslarsche Zeitung critic ran out of superlatives: “How can one write criticism when the whole evening was without a flaw?” Acclaim awaited the quartet in small towns as well as big: In Sweden’s Malmo (pop. 192,498), they turned down an offer of a three-month teaching contract; in a town in the French Alps they were toasted in champagne by the local chamber music society. Financially, the tour was less successful : because they decided to take their families (“It’s the best insurance against divorce”), the players paid out $25,000, took in only $15,000. But they had no regrets as they closed out their tour last week. Said Second Violinist Loft: “We played Ravel in France, Beethoven in Germany, Holmboe in Copenhagen, and everywhere threw in some American modern. We went into the lion’s den and came out unscathed. Now I hope Europeans realize Americans can play chamber music even if they are from Chicago.”