KCMETROPOLIS - Calder Quartet Review
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The Calder Quartet arrived in white shirts, black suit coats and skinny ties. Instead of briefcases, they carry string instruments, each from a different performance period. They are prompt, attentive and sticklers for detail. Just the sort of ensemble any presenter would be proud to hire.
Their job is to turn audiences on to 20th and 21 century string quartet music and they don’t take it lightly. Where some touring groups will slough off a performance or two in some out of the way place like Lawrence, Kansas, this ensemble seems to understand that if they let down any audience, they let down the composers, many of whom are close friends - and then everyone would lose. They are dedicated and loyal to their field.
The program presented Thursday April 2nd at the Lied Center in Lawrence, was entitled American Masterpieces-Chamber Music. Selling chamber music in the vacuous Lied Center is tough. There isn’t a sense of intimacy, but with the intensity of the selections they chose, a little space wasn’t a bad thing.
Composer Terry Reilly’s pieces opened and closed the evening beginning with the Mythic Bird Waltz he wrote in 1983. According to the liner notes, he had been inspired by his studies in Hindu music and utilized sitar techniques and raga. The opening bars were long chords that crushed and crunched harmonically. The fast sections dodged and wove like a fast paced car chase. Aside from the first violinist’s solo imitating a Khayal, the Hindustani vocal genre, the Indian sounds weren’t obvious to my ear. Living in a global economy, Americans are used to imports. As exotic as India is, the musical material doesn’t sounds as fresh today as it might have sounded in the early 1980’s but with the success of the film, Slumdog Millionaire, audiences can appreciate this piece in a new way.
The visceral Christopher Rouse piece, String Quartet No. 1 written in 1982 was particularly exciting. The second violinist and spokesman, Andrew Bulbrook describes Rouse as a close personal friend of the group who wrote the piece just after his girlfriend dumped him. Knowing that bit of trivia, made the piece come completely alive. Touted as a 17-minute scream of rage, it was like being inside the brain of a man in turmoil. Rouse makes it sound like the strings are shouting expletives. The music is overloaded and confused and the ostinato underlay feels like a pacing heartbeat: one can almost hear the blood surging through veins and agitated breathing. Toward the end the rage dies and gives way to the feeling of complete emotional exhaustion. The healing could begin. It was spectacular.
How the Quartet had any energy left to perform the last piece in the first half is a mystery. The Quartet for Strings No. 4 by Ben Johnston is a great example of a composer taking a well loved folksong, like Amazing Grace, and through an “ill-tempered” (as intentionally opposed to “well-tempered”)series of variations, twists the audiences ear: hard. The piece opens with a very “out of tune” statement of the theme in four parts. Instead of sounding foreign, it hits a good old American homerun reminding me of the Sacred Harp Shape note singers. The subsequent variations utilize compositional techniques from the ages. Renaissance polyphony is followed by a fugue leading into a “flight of the bumblebee” variation ending with a Pagannini-esk violin solo dripping with rubato.
The final composition of the night was the multi-movement work by Terry Reilly called Cadenza on the Night Plain. It was written for the members of the Kronos Quartet and weaves the story of the forced American Indian migration with virtuosic solos from each of the members. The cadenza’s didn’t work for me. According to the notes, they were written with the personalities of the Kronos members in mind. The gentlemen in the Calder Quartet, thereby, had to channel the Krono’s spirits to really embody the solos and they didn’t. If Terry Reilly were to write new cadenzas for the Calder Quartet, the piece would be more authentic to the original concept.
The Calder Quartet works hard and plays hard. They have a cerebral approach that challenges listeners to expand. There are great chamber pieces being written every year by talented unknown composers. I hope the Calder Quartet continues to extract new material that enlarges the scope of the American musical mind.
REVIEW:
Lied Center at University of Kansas
Calder Quartet
Thursday, April 2 at 7:30 p.m.
Lied Center
19th and Iowa Streets, Lawrence, KS
www.lied.ku.edu
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