On Thursday night, two eminent string quartets offered premieres in New York. At Merkin Corridor, the JACK Quartet unveiled Patricia Alessandrini’s “A Full Historical past of Music (Quantity 1),” Khyam Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in” and George Lewis’s “String Quartet 4.5.” Not far-off, at Zankel Corridor, the Danish String Quartet paired Schubert’s “Loss of life and the Maiden” with Lotta Wennäkoski’s new “Pige.” Our critics have been at each occasions.
JACK Quartet
You at all times bear in mind your first.
The primary stay live performance you attended after the preliminary pandemic lockdown, that’s. So the JACK Quartet will at all times maintain a spot in my coronary heart. However after that out of doors efficiency, on the Morris Museum in New Jersey in August 2020, it was again to a protracted digital-streaming relationship for me and the group. So seeing them in individual once more on Thursday night, nearly two years later, felt like one other of this period’s many completely satisfied reunions.
Showing at Merkin on the tail finish of “Bridges,” a collection offered by the Kaufman Music Heart and the John J. Cali Faculty of Music at Montclair State College, the JACK — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violins; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello — now had optimum indoor acoustics to indicate off their uncanny readability and agility in these three premieres.
Within the cheekily titled, 12-minute “A Full Historical past of Music (Quantity 1),” the quartet’s skittering, ethereal enjoying is translated, via digital processing, into fragments of recordings of works from the classical canon, which appear to mistily encompass the stay sounds.
The outcomes might need been clearer over the super-sophisticated speaker system at Empac, the experimental arts heart in upstate New York the place the piece was workshopped earlier this month. At Merkin, you possibly can make out a refrain within the first part — heard faintly, as if from a distant room. Within the last part, “Appendix 2” (there isn’t any “Appendix 1”), the electronics have been nonetheless very quiet, and unattainable to establish, however had a sure density, a tender sumptuousness.
A trembling motif passes across the 4 devices in Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in,” steadily overlapping in waves for a sort of dusky, shaggy old-school Minimalism. The piece feels shorter than its 19 minutes, the music receding and rebuilding with a fastidiously wrought naturalness, and ending in a serene coda of gradual, hazy unison chords.
Earlier than the JACK performed his “String Quartet 4.5,” Lewis — the eminent composer and scholar just lately named the subsequent inventive director of the Worldwide Modern Ensemble — stated from the stage that he wrote the piece “in opposition to complacency,” as a reminder for audiences to “keep alert.” This can be a political posture, nevertheless it’s additionally a declaration of Barnum-style showmanship, and the 17-minute work richly delivered, commanding consideration like a ringmaster conjuring acrobats.
The acts included sudden slides; a protracted unison squeal; a tiny, valuable duet of little scratches between the primary violin and the cello; and a passage of almost lilting, Mendelssohnian delicacy. The opposite gamers twinklingly twittered as Campbell’s hand slid up and down the neck of his cello, for a woozy ondes Martenot impact. Close to the tip, crunchy grinding gave approach to balletic glassiness. It was a spectacularly assorted circus — and severe enjoyable. ZACHARY WOOLFE
Danish String Quartet
The lads of the Danish String Quartet — the violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and the cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin — are masters of juxtaposition.
Their enlightening “Prism” albums hint traces from Bach’s fugues to late Beethoven and works of the twentieth century. One other collection, “Doppelgänger,” pairs Schubert’s last quartets (and his best piece of chamber music, the String Quintet in C) with premieres that reply to them.
“Doppelgänger” has had a delayed begin in New York. Due to the pandemic, Half I’ll arrive right here final; on Thursday, the second installment got here first, that includes the well-known “Loss of life and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810) and Wennäkoski’s “Pige.”
Nørgaard launched “Loss of life and the Maiden” as “nearly the definition of the Romantic string quartet,” although you wouldn’t have guessed that initially within the group’s interpretation — a managed accumulation that constructed towards a sprinting and determined tarantella.
This work’s nickname comes from Schubert’s earlier tune “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” whose funereal opening serves because the theme for the second motion. Sørensen, as the primary violin, was a stand-in for the Maiden, his articulation firstly delicate, even reticent. Because the music turns into extra animated, it lashes out and retreats, torn between fury and woe; the Danish gamers opted for restraint, their command of the rating absolute however their ardour understated.
Within the second motion, they revealed the ability in Schubert’s pauses, significantly with a affected person ending, like an try to lengthen its second of peace. That couldn’t final endlessly, although: On the coda of that tarantella finale, right here impressively cohesive amid more and more frantic chorales and unstable runs, Loss of life arrives in a sudden minor-key flip, delivered in grandly Romantic vogue.
“Pige” (Danish for “Lady”) shifts the main focus from Loss of life to the Maiden. As response items go, this one displays much less on the quartet — although nods to it abound, as in a model of Schubert’s long-short-short rhythm — and extra on the unique tune. Schubert’s quartet by no means quotes the Maiden’s verse, which will get its due within the first motion of “Pige,” a collection of phrases that begin and disintegrate in wispy fragments and fading arpeggios.
All through, Wennäkoski balances prolonged method and expressive lyricism, typically layering the 2, however bringing the devices collectively for affecting silences. Then comes the intense, episodic finale, “The Lady and the Scrapbook,” which takes flight with up-bow prospers and an informal reference to Cyndi Lauper’s “Women Simply Need to Have Enjoyable.” Within the last measure, the cellist (Schubert’s voice for Loss of life within the quartet) tears a sheet of paper — “slowly and repeatedly,” the rating says, at a forte.
The group adopted “Pige” with a transcription of “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” an easy remedy with a contact of frostiness in trilled harmonics. That would have been a baked-in encore, however the Danish gamers returned with one other association: of “Der Doppelgänger,” the collection’s namesake.
They referred to it as “certainly one of Schubert’s finest songs.” I’d agree, and add that it’s additionally certainly one of his most terrifying, which they teased out by constructing on its harmonic ambiguity for a rigidity nearly as discomfiting because the considered dying itself. JOSHUA BARONE
