August 29, 2016

  • Crossroads Project: 2 New Quartets

     

    The Crossroads Project: Music of Kaminsky & Larsen
    Fry Street Quartet
    Navona Records 6054
    Total Time:  43:34
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    The Crossroads Project is sponsored by the physicist Dr. Robert Davies and is intended to explore societal and ecological issues.  The present release features two works for string quartet that could not have chosen two composers as adept at transformative musical exploration.  The Fry Street Quartet first appeared in Hickory, North Carolina, but currently is in residency at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.  In concert, the pieces are evidently intended to be a more multi-disciplinary experience involving visuals and lighting along with other aspects of the arts.

    The first work, recorded in Purchase, New York, features music by Laura Kaminsky, whose is chair of the composition department there.  Rising Tide is her sixth string quartet and focuses on connections to water imagery that floats in different ways through each of the four movements.  The opening movement seems to creep up on to an ever-growing vista that features an idea that grows ever stronger in a structural arc that then moves ever further away.   A more reflective movement follows with a somewhat ethereal quality.  The scherzo movement, has the quartet scurrying about with pizzicato ideas helping to provide some additional excitement as this idea is tossed about the ensemble.  The more reverential final movement provides an almost hymn-like feel with gestures that also seem to reflect back on the journey we are taken on in the work.  Each of the movements bears some growing connection to water starting as “The Source of Life”, a reflection on the “Bios” or life itself, running about to “Forage” and then think more globally in “Societas” and our own human connections to the environment.  The quartet itself is tightly structured with intriguing ideas that hold together well as it unfolds.  Hinging the work on a more traditional quartet formal plan temporally helps make the work equally more accessible.  Kaminsky creates some often fastening harmonies in the slower portions of the work with the more rapid moments tending to be layered individual ideas interacting across the quartet.  The final movement helps create a more emotional sensibility as the intricate harmonies help sum up the musical discourse.

    Emergence is Libby Larsen’s contribution and is set up as five different “reactions” or experiences expressed as the emotions of the movement titles.  These are further connected creatively to the water cycle itself.  The first movement, “Radiant”, utilizes the upper range of the quartet with skittering ideas the main focus.  “Reactive” feels a bit more dance like in its ideas with an occasional longer thematic thread in this almost jazzy experience which features rapid shifts from bow to pizzicato and a few stark sound techniques.  The track feels as if it is dialed out (suggesting it can continue based on the experience of the accompanying non-musical components).  In “Rage”, Larsen resorts to a series of close intervallic double stopping between the quartet in an often fascinating argumentative way with explosions of passionate response.  She also resorts to a quote for the fourth movement.  Here, “The Water is Wide” is used as a connective factor as it moves from violin to cello against more dissonant punctuations in an almost Ives-ian quality as even “Ole Man River” shows up as well.  The final movement essentially dissipates (“Reverence”).

    These are two quite different works exploring water imagery by two important contemporary American composers.  Kaminsky’s lands well in the more traditional overall quartet structure while Larsen’s might feel at times like an extension of more intense latter 20th-Century quartet writing.  Both use accessible harmonic language, but then tweak this with fascinating dissonant approaches that uniquely engage the drama of their individual work.  The really only bad thing about the release is its overall brevity.  That said, it is highly worth tracking down!!