With the 20th century a quarter century behind us, it’s now possible to program a concert of greatest hits around the daring white men of the era who have at length settled somewhere along the edges of convention.
The JACK Quartet framed its concert at Symphony Space on Manhattan’s Upper West Side around the Pierre Boulez centennial and around – violinist Austin Wulliman explained from the stage – posing a conversation between the composer and his contemporaries. The first half suggested connections with the Second Viennese School and the New York minimalists, pitting wee little Webern between roughly a half hour each of Boulez’ Livre pour cordes (1, 2, 3c) and Philip Glass’ String Quartet no. 5.
The musicians nearly swayed together with the fluctuations and soft flow of Boulez, keeping a graceful tempo but pronouncing sudden changes in dynamic. It’s not a comedic piece but, in JACK’s eight hands, it almost seemed peppered with pratfalls and jump scares. The 6 Bagatelles of Anton Webern (the only 19th-century baby on the bill) made for an impressive display in fewer than a half dozen minutes, held together through incongruities and broken symmetries, by JACK’s unified attack, giving it a lovely fluidity, playing with the fullness of their customary warmth. It was achingly gorgeous.
Rushing forward eight decades, the grand (near) unisons of the Glass quartet came off like Beethoven in a dream, soothing the mind after the delightful disturbances – very nearly triggering low-level anxieties – of the first two selections. Here it was less the warmth than their fantastic precision at play, accentuating the hidden dissonances allowing one of the city’s finest quartets a little flex.
The second half brought surely the best and least known names on the program. Boulez had a long and sometimes contentious friendship with John Cage, who remains a beloved eccentric in New York City, even among those who would hardly countenance such sounds from some contemporary young upstart. But his String Quartet in Four Parts is particularly lovely, wedded largely to tonality, even going so far as to employ a canon. If the Boulez moved in fits and starts, here there were no roughly hewn edges, no abrupt steps or sudden stops. There is, to be sure, something nebulous about the piece, but JACK found the capital-R Romanticism within and below the fragmented phrases.
The wonderful Heinz Holliger’s 2007 String Quartet no. 2, the most recent piece on the program by far, concluded the concert, a demanding scordatura with sharp turns and angry glissandi in rich detail, thick discordant clouds and thematic statements submerged in a thick, legato marsh. It’s brutal at times, then delicate like an afterthought, thick and undulating, mysterious, organic, tempestuous, opaque and magical. It’s a remarkable piece of music but even so it was a bold choice to close the concert, maybe even to include at all. It served as a sort of summary, though, giving us all the challenges and beauty of the preceding pieces then dropping us off closer to the current era. Holliger’s own centennial is a short, 14 years away. Maybe then, JACK will give us a celebration of connections for that 100th birthday.
Presented by Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival, Victoria Bond, Artistic Director
