Adams for Four, &c.
Thawing out the post-Super Bowl blog commentary does (as Pete says) take some time, but life has continued apace in the meantime, free of the promise of unbelievable football occurrences though it may be, and for less than a week at this point, at that.
Right before the Super Bowl, actually, or rather two Thursdays ago, I ducked into NYC for the evening to catch the St. Lawrence String Quartet premiering a new, full-length John Adams string quartet at Juilliard. Titled with none of Adams's usual wit, the work goes by the name String Quartet, and it courses along for about a half-hour in a meandering manner similar to some of the single-movement orchestral works Adams has penned. The Quartet is actually in two movements, the first much longer than the second, but they aren't incredibly sharply distinguished in character, save for a surprisingly introspective conclusion arrived at right before the movement break.
Overall it's an enjoyable piece, with flashes of exceptional charm, often tossing off crisply rhythmic ideas in the first movement and then whimsically switching gears. Adams is very witty at times, and the lighter ensemble serves him well in these moments. At other times there's a muddier sound, like a symphonic concentrate; I wonder if it will improve with continued performance. (The St. Lawrence Quartet played well and with uncommon kinetic energy, including the occasional foot stomp and some worked-up contortions of posture during metrically elastic sections.) Adams writes very little chamber music, and you can hear the big ideas struggling to explode out of these thicker textures. The second movement had some bolder, Beethovenian vigor to it, slashing sometimes to a halt only to be rekindled, but I'm not convinced it carried itself more emphatically than the first movement. If the piece has a big flaw it's the dramatic tension sagging under the span of so much freeform music. The St. Lawrences will no doubt take the piece around enough to tighten it up some, though. I doubt it'll wash out as one of Adams's masterpieces, but I'd like to hear it again.
Earlier in the concert came a splendidly eerie rendition of Ingram Marshall's "Fog Tropes" and a fine performance of Lou Harrison's marvelously ingratiating "Varied Trio" (for violin, piano, and percussion, composed in the 1980s but new to me), full of peppy rhythms, Asian modes, percussive porcelain bowls, and some of the most generously sweet gamelan-inspired classical music I've heard. A couple of romantic inner movements could have used some more shapely violin playing, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a recent chamber work as warmhearted as this one.
The concert opener was hard to figure out, a violin-ensemble work by a young composer named Andrew Norman called Gran Turismo (titled after the video game, no less) that screamed "student work" and was written five years ago anyway, and could have been dropped from the long program without too many tears shed. Some shifting fluorescent chords being tossed around between players were interesting; most of the rest of the piece sounded like discarded bits of Bernard Herrmann's "Psycho" soundtrack. Go figure.
All in all, the concert was certainly the most exciting event I watched last week that didn't involve someone intercepting something and returning it 100 yards for a touchdown.
Right before the Super Bowl, actually, or rather two Thursdays ago, I ducked into NYC for the evening to catch the St. Lawrence String Quartet premiering a new, full-length John Adams string quartet at Juilliard. Titled with none of Adams's usual wit, the work goes by the name String Quartet, and it courses along for about a half-hour in a meandering manner similar to some of the single-movement orchestral works Adams has penned. The Quartet is actually in two movements, the first much longer than the second, but they aren't incredibly sharply distinguished in character, save for a surprisingly introspective conclusion arrived at right before the movement break.
Overall it's an enjoyable piece, with flashes of exceptional charm, often tossing off crisply rhythmic ideas in the first movement and then whimsically switching gears. Adams is very witty at times, and the lighter ensemble serves him well in these moments. At other times there's a muddier sound, like a symphonic concentrate; I wonder if it will improve with continued performance. (The St. Lawrence Quartet played well and with uncommon kinetic energy, including the occasional foot stomp and some worked-up contortions of posture during metrically elastic sections.) Adams writes very little chamber music, and you can hear the big ideas struggling to explode out of these thicker textures. The second movement had some bolder, Beethovenian vigor to it, slashing sometimes to a halt only to be rekindled, but I'm not convinced it carried itself more emphatically than the first movement. If the piece has a big flaw it's the dramatic tension sagging under the span of so much freeform music. The St. Lawrences will no doubt take the piece around enough to tighten it up some, though. I doubt it'll wash out as one of Adams's masterpieces, but I'd like to hear it again.
Earlier in the concert came a splendidly eerie rendition of Ingram Marshall's "Fog Tropes" and a fine performance of Lou Harrison's marvelously ingratiating "Varied Trio" (for violin, piano, and percussion, composed in the 1980s but new to me), full of peppy rhythms, Asian modes, percussive porcelain bowls, and some of the most generously sweet gamelan-inspired classical music I've heard. A couple of romantic inner movements could have used some more shapely violin playing, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a recent chamber work as warmhearted as this one.
The concert opener was hard to figure out, a violin-ensemble work by a young composer named Andrew Norman called Gran Turismo (titled after the video game, no less) that screamed "student work" and was written five years ago anyway, and could have been dropped from the long program without too many tears shed. Some shifting fluorescent chords being tossed around between players were interesting; most of the rest of the piece sounded like discarded bits of Bernard Herrmann's "Psycho" soundtrack. Go figure.
All in all, the concert was certainly the most exciting event I watched last week that didn't involve someone intercepting something and returning it 100 yards for a touchdown.
1 Comments:
Thanks for the concert write-up; I enjoy these a lot. My own concert-going has gotten pretty slack for the past couple of months but I continue to envy your easy access to New York's classical music events.
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