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concert review: Daedalus Quartet
It's been summer weather, stifling and airless in the acoustically well-equipped le petit Trianon. The building doors were left open in fruitless mitigation.
Inside, the Daedalus Quartet gave a smooth and matter-of-fact performance, pleasant enough, but de-emphasizing the quirkiness of Haydn's Op. 20, No. 6; then, joined by clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, gave supremely blended sound to the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. Properly stirred together, the clarinet and strings as a unit sound unlike either of them separately. Brahms wanted that combined sound, and here he got it; but the interpretation of the work was dull and sketchily shaped. What was missing was shown up by contrast with an encore of the slow movement from the Mozart quintet, which brilliantly caught the sheer beauty in Mozart's plainness.
Also on the program, Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 5 (1995). I know it's Carter's centenary year, and he's long been feted as a genius, but look: I've been listening to abstract modern music for nearly forty years, and I love a lot of dark, unforgiving works. So if a piece does absolutely nothing for me, then I don't think the failure is entirely mine, no matter how eminent the composer, see?
In my latest published review, I'd written that John Adams's music is "made to be listened to," and is not "a dull intellectual exercise for the benefit of the performers." This is the type of work I meant to contrast Adams to. Carter was inspired to write this work by watching chamber groups rehearse, trying ideas out on each other, wordlessly shifting to accommodate the ensemble. And from what I could tell, the intricate exchanges and handovers and rhythmic overlays must make this a fascinatingly challenging work to play. But that's not a substitute for communicating ideas or emotions to the listener. The only point of interest in this work was the shifting sonorities - as I noted, the Daedalus Quartet are excellent in displaying sound quality - but in the absence of anything to connect it to, it was like half an hour of watching musical wallpaper dry.
Inside, the Daedalus Quartet gave a smooth and matter-of-fact performance, pleasant enough, but de-emphasizing the quirkiness of Haydn's Op. 20, No. 6; then, joined by clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, gave supremely blended sound to the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. Properly stirred together, the clarinet and strings as a unit sound unlike either of them separately. Brahms wanted that combined sound, and here he got it; but the interpretation of the work was dull and sketchily shaped. What was missing was shown up by contrast with an encore of the slow movement from the Mozart quintet, which brilliantly caught the sheer beauty in Mozart's plainness.
Also on the program, Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 5 (1995). I know it's Carter's centenary year, and he's long been feted as a genius, but look: I've been listening to abstract modern music for nearly forty years, and I love a lot of dark, unforgiving works. So if a piece does absolutely nothing for me, then I don't think the failure is entirely mine, no matter how eminent the composer, see?
In my latest published review, I'd written that John Adams's music is "made to be listened to," and is not "a dull intellectual exercise for the benefit of the performers." This is the type of work I meant to contrast Adams to. Carter was inspired to write this work by watching chamber groups rehearse, trying ideas out on each other, wordlessly shifting to accommodate the ensemble. And from what I could tell, the intricate exchanges and handovers and rhythmic overlays must make this a fascinatingly challenging work to play. But that's not a substitute for communicating ideas or emotions to the listener. The only point of interest in this work was the shifting sonorities - as I noted, the Daedalus Quartet are excellent in displaying sound quality - but in the absence of anything to connect it to, it was like half an hour of watching musical wallpaper dry.
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(Anonymous) 2009-04-21 09:13 pm (UTC)(link)Don Keller
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I can certainly appreciate music intellectually, but music is so much more than abstract thought.
p.s. Hi, Don!
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Make the art emotionally appealing , a joy to listen to, first. Then it will be both worthwhile, and a pleasure, to study it intellectually as well. The best art measures high on both scales.
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(Anonymous) 2009-04-22 01:41 pm (UTC)(link)After ten or fifteen minutes of that, I switched over to Michael Gordon's =Trance=, which is being performed here in New York tonight (but which I think I'll skip because of the ticket price). Now, I'm not the biggest fan of minimalism, but the sheer rhythmic energy generated by Gordon's disjunct layers of ostinato was in startling contrast to Carter's etiolated discontinuities.
(Gordon's music also contrasts with the smoother, more dovetailing layering of Glass and Reich.)
Speaking of minimalism: the various descriptions of John Adams' new string quartet (of which yours was one of the best) are making my mouth water. If you should hear about a web broadcast of the piece, do let us know.
Don Keller
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Comparing that with the Adams, I see that my only criticism of the Adams was that it seemed to jump from idea to idea, while my only interest in the Carter was its "shifting sonorities."
This may seem superficially contradictory, so let me expand a little:
First, these comments are within a larger context. If the Adams had had no other virtues whatever, listening to it jump around would still have been passingly interesting, at least as much as the Carter was.
Second, it's true that the Adams felt rather disjointed, while the Carter did not. But everything that Adams did was in the service of musical communication as well as playerly noodling. That outweighs a lot.