Death and His String Band
[Wednesday night, 6/21.—ed.]
Tonight’s live soundtrack: the Calder Quartet playing Beethoven’s Op. 59 no.2, preceded by Chris Rouse’s Quartet No.2 and Shostakovich’s 13th, for a small but switched-on crowd in the campus recital hall. Saw this with Stu, who’s into the modern classical thing, as well as into the beer and pizza beforehand thing. Hooray for people with similar interests!
I was wondering about the Calder name, and I think there’s something in there about moving parts being connected by artistic composition. That’s as opposed to being connected by shared emotional striving, which characterizes your traditional chamber group, and that’s not at all a negative against the Calders. They played extremely unsentimentally, with expertly modulated texture and intensity, and this unlocked a lot of power in all three pieces. It knocked the audience’s socks off, too.
At the beginning of Shostakovich 13 — my favorite quartet of his, and musically the strangest — the viola alone introduces a wandering, desolate theme, and is after a little while joined by the other strings offering a bitter accompaniment. Passing harmonies and a couple of significant cadences occur on acrid, bitter dissonances. The Calders play these dissonances without any added inflection or change in tone, which is a subtle but important effect: everything feels icy, suspended, removed.
The rest of the quartet followed in a similarly cold and ghostly reading, with the intense moments given a razor-wire sharpness. The bizarre, almost jazz-folk sounding episode in the middle — I suggest the descriptive nickname “Death and His String Band” — had a bloodless, ashen quality: a dead joke, an evil omen. All of it was gripping. The violist is the major player throughout much of this quartet: the Calders’, Jonathan Moerschel, concentrated the feeling of the piece into a strong tone and sharp-cornered phrasing.
Rouse wrote his Second Quartet (’88) with Shostakovich in mind, and it’s a great pairing with the 13th – it shares its short, curdled and dissonant melodies, while offering a contrasting, more consistently four-voiced texture. Like Shostakovich it’s obsessively death-haunted; but unlike Shostakovich that’s always expressed in raw emotion, without any of the cryptic aloofness. There are three movements: slow-fast-slow. The slow movements come in slowly breathing phrases, with short but abyssal pauses in between; the fast movement is hallucinatory, with swirling melodic shapes stopping, starting, and cascading up and down in parallel atonal chords. In the last few minutes of the piece, Rouse suddenly shifts tone into something more American-sounding, transcendental, and a bit in common with Barber’s Adagio, though much less heart-on-sleeve. It’s good to hear it in the Calders’ unsentimental style to keep it from getting over-sweet. The last minute or so reintroduces a trace of chromatic poison, leading to an ambiguous, unsettled conclusion.
The first movement of the Beethoven was the most striking: after Rouse & Shostakovich, the Calders played it as if it had been written in the same style: emphasizing sudden dynamic changes, slipping jolts of dead silence between phrases, playing with a cool and very un-romantic tone. This works, and works well; though it wouldn’t transfer to the other movements, so it was a good call for them not to go for the same effect, even if the quartet didn’t feel completely of a piece as a result. The second movement is slow, lyrical and marked con molto di sentimento; here it was austere and classical in a sculpted-in-marble kind of way. The last two movements are dancy, though off-kilter and rippled with angsty minor-key kinds of harmonies. For this they finally let go a bit and did some fiddling, shifting into a solid and earthy tone and, just as significantly, leaning towards each other and playing with more bodily motion. A perfect upshift in tempo at the coda and then the powerful concluding strokes of the piece: bam, they stick the landing, everyone cheers. Beethoven lives.
Tonight’s live soundtrack: the Calder Quartet playing Beethoven’s Op. 59 no.2, preceded by Chris Rouse’s Quartet No.2 and Shostakovich’s 13th, for a small but switched-on crowd in the campus recital hall. Saw this with Stu, who’s into the modern classical thing, as well as into the beer and pizza beforehand thing. Hooray for people with similar interests!
I was wondering about the Calder name, and I think there’s something in there about moving parts being connected by artistic composition. That’s as opposed to being connected by shared emotional striving, which characterizes your traditional chamber group, and that’s not at all a negative against the Calders. They played extremely unsentimentally, with expertly modulated texture and intensity, and this unlocked a lot of power in all three pieces. It knocked the audience’s socks off, too.
At the beginning of Shostakovich 13 — my favorite quartet of his, and musically the strangest — the viola alone introduces a wandering, desolate theme, and is after a little while joined by the other strings offering a bitter accompaniment. Passing harmonies and a couple of significant cadences occur on acrid, bitter dissonances. The Calders play these dissonances without any added inflection or change in tone, which is a subtle but important effect: everything feels icy, suspended, removed.
The rest of the quartet followed in a similarly cold and ghostly reading, with the intense moments given a razor-wire sharpness. The bizarre, almost jazz-folk sounding episode in the middle — I suggest the descriptive nickname “Death and His String Band” — had a bloodless, ashen quality: a dead joke, an evil omen. All of it was gripping. The violist is the major player throughout much of this quartet: the Calders’, Jonathan Moerschel, concentrated the feeling of the piece into a strong tone and sharp-cornered phrasing.
Rouse wrote his Second Quartet (’88) with Shostakovich in mind, and it’s a great pairing with the 13th – it shares its short, curdled and dissonant melodies, while offering a contrasting, more consistently four-voiced texture. Like Shostakovich it’s obsessively death-haunted; but unlike Shostakovich that’s always expressed in raw emotion, without any of the cryptic aloofness. There are three movements: slow-fast-slow. The slow movements come in slowly breathing phrases, with short but abyssal pauses in between; the fast movement is hallucinatory, with swirling melodic shapes stopping, starting, and cascading up and down in parallel atonal chords. In the last few minutes of the piece, Rouse suddenly shifts tone into something more American-sounding, transcendental, and a bit in common with Barber’s Adagio, though much less heart-on-sleeve. It’s good to hear it in the Calders’ unsentimental style to keep it from getting over-sweet. The last minute or so reintroduces a trace of chromatic poison, leading to an ambiguous, unsettled conclusion.
The first movement of the Beethoven was the most striking: after Rouse & Shostakovich, the Calders played it as if it had been written in the same style: emphasizing sudden dynamic changes, slipping jolts of dead silence between phrases, playing with a cool and very un-romantic tone. This works, and works well; though it wouldn’t transfer to the other movements, so it was a good call for them not to go for the same effect, even if the quartet didn’t feel completely of a piece as a result. The second movement is slow, lyrical and marked con molto di sentimento; here it was austere and classical in a sculpted-in-marble kind of way. The last two movements are dancy, though off-kilter and rippled with angsty minor-key kinds of harmonies. For this they finally let go a bit and did some fiddling, shifting into a solid and earthy tone and, just as significantly, leaning towards each other and playing with more bodily motion. A perfect upshift in tempo at the coda and then the powerful concluding strokes of the piece: bam, they stick the landing, everyone cheers. Beethoven lives.
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