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The Juliet Letters, a song cycle written and performed by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet — no guitars, no drums — came close to not happening at all. If Costello hadn't chanced to be going to the Brodsky's concerts at the same time members of the British string quartet were going to his ... If Costello's wife hadn't chanced to spot that newspaper item about a professor in Verona answering letters addressed to "Juliet Capulet" ... As it turned out, the completed songs, mainly Costello's, but with major contributions from the quartet, have little to do with Romeo and Juliet or the obsessed academic, though much to do with love and obsession. Knowing Elvis Costello, you knew that already.
After 17 years and 17 albums, Costello (real name: Declan MacManus) is no longer lumped with such punk-rock primitives as the Sex Pistols. His early classic "Alison" is sufficient evidence he was never a nihilist, but a romantic and a moralist, with a thin skin of self-protective irony. Like the far sunnier Paul McCartney (with whom he's collaborated), he's a songwriter beyond genre, with a gift for melody and a way with words, who works in rock 'n' roll almost by happenstance. Though Costello disagrees. "That would imply that rock 'n' roll is an inferior form, which you somehow have to cure yourself of," he says. "Little Richard means as much to me as Thelonious Monk or Stravinsky." Not "more than"? The very names show his eclecticism.
It's not surprising, then, that Costello sought out the Brodsky, one of those new-wave string quartets, like the Kronos in the United States, which spice up the classical repertoire with new works and do the odd encore by Gershwin, Brubeck or Hendrix. This is their 21st year: violinist Michael Thomas, 33, and cellist Jacqueline Thomas, his sister, 32, were preteen prodigies; only violist Paul Cassidy wasn't an original member. Their recordings, notably of the Shostakovich cycle, win them awards; playing at designer Issey Miyake's fashion shows helps their insouciant image. With an aging audience for chamber music, says Michael Thomas, "the future doesn't look that bright"; besides his musical contributions, Costello has given the quartet younger listeners and wider exposure.
The self-taught Costello, in return, became musically literate — he was drafting four-part scores by the end of their six-month collaboration — and got a chance to stretch himself both esthetically and vocally. These songs evoke Schubert and Shostakovitch (and maybe Sondheim), with hard-to-nail chromatic intervals, operatic high notes and Wagnerian melodic meanderings; the one direct quote is from Tristan und Isolde.
The epistolary form, both confessional and artificial, yields mash notes and suicide notes; an aunt's tart reply to a begging letter is a comic tango; a fantasia on junk mail ("This Offer Is Unrepeatable") is a mad 6/8 canter. Violinist Ian Belton's "Why?" is a child's stark note: "Why is Daddy not here? ... If you both love me so, why don't you love each other?" In "The First to Leave," a believer in an afterlife writes to his atheist lover: "I should open with a kiss / For if you're reading this / You must have opened up your case / And found this letter where I placed it." Despite (or because of) its austere formality, it's hard to sit dry-eyed through The Juliet Letters. It's hardly Elvis Costello's most characteristic work, but it may be his purest.
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