Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | JACK Quartet

The JACK Quartet frames its recital at Symphony Space on Manhattan’s Upper West Side around the Pierre Boulez centennial. 

The JACK Quartet give an immaculate performance of a disastrously programmed concert at the 92nd St Y. 

At Wigmore Hall, the JACK Quartet's sonic mastery gives a lift to Liza Lim and threatens to start a carrot revolution.

It was like a quiet day in a sunny room. The air was still, shadows and colors changed as the sun moved across the sky, but nothing inside the room ever actually moved.

The Greek composer's centenary is marked by the London Sinfonietta, Colin Currie Group and the JACK Quartet. 

An insistently slow premiere by Eric Wubbels is followed by a longer work by Catherine Lamb which makes the former sound almost like a calypso. 

Even playing in total darkness, the JACK Quartet offers illuminating insights.

John Zorn’s compositions presented at The Cloisters contained a bonanza of musical ideas, rolling in unnervingly peculiar waves and presented in clumps and clusters like audio versions of found art. 

A concert of five composers, and three of them women – bravo to the JACK Quartet not just for inimitable execution, but for programming as well.

The magical potential of electroacoustic music was on display Thursday evening in the cavernous, dilapidated pier that is Fort Mason’s Herbst Pavilion in San Francisco.

The extraordinary JACK Quartet showcase music by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Christopher Trapani, Brian Ferneyhough, Julian Anderson and Horaţiu Rădulescu at Wigmore Hall.

This performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’ Third String Quartet, performed in the dark as part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival,  was an engulfing, unique experience, made all the more so by the ethereal music.

On Sunday evening the JACK Quartet, seemingly ubiquitous in new music circles, performed an enlightening array of musical styles at (Le) Poisson Rouge, joined by rising young cellist Joshua Roman. The thoughtful programming was almost as chronologically diverse as it could have been.

“I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music”, Steve Reich wrote in his 1968 essay Music as a Gradual Process. His music of the 1960s, from tape pieces such as It’s Gonna Rain to instrumental works like Piano Phase, employed phasing and looping techniques. These compositions are some of the first examples of both process music and downtown musical minimalism.

The volume was that of a string quartet on steroids, but the sound was that of eight extraordinary string players each playing slightly different things. James Clarke’s 2012-S, for two string quartets, gave an explosive, subtle start to the Arditti and JACK Quartets’ joint Wigmore Hall recital this Monday.

“Wheel: mechanical, circular motion. The brake was invented later.”Enno Poppe’s words about Rad (“Wheel”), the first piece on his Composer Portraits concert at Miller Theatre on Saturday night, express well the experience of listening to it.

Good news for skeptics: modernist music can be beautiful. If what keeps listeners away from the “difficult” music written in the past century is a fear of dissonance, they can rest assured.