![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
concert review: Ives Quartet
Apr. 26th, 2009 10:21 pmThat was a good new string quartet I heard, or at least I liked it. After last week's debacle with Elliott Carter, it was good to confirm that someone besides John Adams is currently writing music for this ensemble with a human soul behind it.
Dan Becker, a shaggy bear of a guy in his late 40s, turns out to be a minimalist. He studied with both Terry Riley and Louis Andriessen, and he's somewhere between them: sharper edges than Riley without getting all motoric about it. His Time Rising, premiered this evening, has an interesting structure: three brief movements each present a musical idea; the much longer fourth one combines them, each dominant in turn. "Sky" is long held open-spaced chords. "Wind" is a fast rhythmic motive overlaid canonically and in phase motion. "Wings" is a cursive modal melody over pizzicato, rather like Hovhaness. Put them all together and you get to "Fly". Second violin plays the line of "Wings" over the rhythm of "Wind" with the sonority of "Sky"; hands off to cello, then viola. "Wings" takes over, then we slow down for "Sky", and the viola takes up "Wings" again. Gradually "Wind" returns for the conclusion. Not the most profound work, perhaps, but how imaginative, beautiful, and satisfying. Resisted urge to walk up to composer afterwards and say, "You're a much better composer than that crappy Elliott Carter guy," less because it might be taken wrongly than because it isn't a good enough compliment.
This was Dan Becker's first work for string quartet, it says here, so it was paired with two other composers' firsts: Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 3, first composed of his first set of quartets, in his late 20s; and Ernst von Dohnanyi's Piano Quintet No. 1, composed at the age of 18 in 1895 and published as his Op. 1 after it got an approving nod from Johannes Brahms. Of course it would, because a more Brahmsian work by somebody else you're never likely to hear. Full of heavy piano chords (here played by Christopher Basso) and tutti strings. This only causes the degree to which it is, well, not quite as good as Brahms to stand out, but it was enjoyable nonetheless, and the players in the brilliant and forgiving acoustic of a mostly empty le petit Trianon sounded terrific.
If you want, you can hear them again on Friday in Palo Alto.
Dan Becker, a shaggy bear of a guy in his late 40s, turns out to be a minimalist. He studied with both Terry Riley and Louis Andriessen, and he's somewhere between them: sharper edges than Riley without getting all motoric about it. His Time Rising, premiered this evening, has an interesting structure: three brief movements each present a musical idea; the much longer fourth one combines them, each dominant in turn. "Sky" is long held open-spaced chords. "Wind" is a fast rhythmic motive overlaid canonically and in phase motion. "Wings" is a cursive modal melody over pizzicato, rather like Hovhaness. Put them all together and you get to "Fly". Second violin plays the line of "Wings" over the rhythm of "Wind" with the sonority of "Sky"; hands off to cello, then viola. "Wings" takes over, then we slow down for "Sky", and the viola takes up "Wings" again. Gradually "Wind" returns for the conclusion. Not the most profound work, perhaps, but how imaginative, beautiful, and satisfying. Resisted urge to walk up to composer afterwards and say, "You're a much better composer than that crappy Elliott Carter guy," less because it might be taken wrongly than because it isn't a good enough compliment.
This was Dan Becker's first work for string quartet, it says here, so it was paired with two other composers' firsts: Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 3, first composed of his first set of quartets, in his late 20s; and Ernst von Dohnanyi's Piano Quintet No. 1, composed at the age of 18 in 1895 and published as his Op. 1 after it got an approving nod from Johannes Brahms. Of course it would, because a more Brahmsian work by somebody else you're never likely to hear. Full of heavy piano chords (here played by Christopher Basso) and tutti strings. This only causes the degree to which it is, well, not quite as good as Brahms to stand out, but it was enjoyable nonetheless, and the players in the brilliant and forgiving acoustic of a mostly empty le petit Trianon sounded terrific.
If you want, you can hear them again on Friday in Palo Alto.
