The Knights’ mission is to carve out a cultural space where virtuosity and other values of the classical realm coexist with contemporary informality and other musical genres. Chris Thile brought his flamethrower of a mandolin to Zankel Hall last night to help them clear that space.
Thile took one of the solo lines in the Vivace from Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, alongside concertmaster Colin Jacobsen. The combination works well; it’s easier to separate and appreciate the two solo lines with different timbres. Jacobsen’s seeming obliviousness to Thile’s attempts to engage as they played dimmed Thile’s terawatt smile and buoyant stage presence not a bit. Eric Jacobsen, the Knights’ conductor and Colin’s brother, led the group in a well-balanced, propulsive accompaniment.
Thile was the vocalist for Caroline Shaw’s And So. The song was originally written for mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. Thile, whose voice is a sweet pop tenor in the mold of, say, Ed Sheeran, of necessity gave a very different rendition. But Shaw’s eclectic language lends itself to that approach well, and I like this version for string orchestra rather than quartet a lot; the instrumental textures float like clouds or sting like paper cuts.
The centerpiece of the first half was Curtis Stewart’s Toward America, a “symphonic rhapsody” on Dvořák’s beloved “American” String Quartet, written the same year as the “New World” Symphony and sharing the same type of material. The idea apparently was that the structure of the quartet, arranged here for chamber orchestra, would be “peeled back” from time to time to reveal more contemporary American genres from blues to hip-hop. I am sorry to say that this was almost entirely unsuccessful. The orchestral version never established its own identity, sounding like a student orchestration exercise. Particularly vexing was Stewart’s inclusion of a drum kit and then refusal to use it to actually establish a groove, merely suggesting one during the “peeled back” passages. Perhaps as a result, The Knights often sounded a little ragged for the first time in my experience, despite Eric Jacobsen’s gestural clarity.
Colin Jacobsen’s Sheriff’s Freud, though, worked like a charm. Also originally for quartet and based on fiddle tunes, the orchestral version uses its drum kit effectively, and the bluegrass breakdown solos for the principal strings were a treat, violist Kyle Armbrust standing out for sheer intensity. Flutist Alex Sopp was featured as a vocalist.
Thile was back after intermission as the center of attention in ATTENTION! This 45-minute piece is billed as a “narrative song cycle”, but that doesn’t do it justice. It’s part solo oratorio, part confessional stand-up comedy act, part virtuoso showcase, and entirely entertaining. It’s a whirlwind of manic charm and energy balanced atop a structure of exquisite craft. Director Claire Coffee (Thile’s wife) deserves a great deal of credit for channeling Thile’s irrepressible, unpremeditated physicality into clear storytelling without his looking hemmed in.
Thile is a flirt. He flirted with the audience, he flirted with the orchestra, and even the piece itself is a flirt – a warm-up solo and two false starts for tuning turn out to have been scripted all along. ATTENTION! tells the true story of how Thile met Carrie Fisher at a party at a music distributors’ convention. Thile slips seamlessly among speech, rhythmic speech and song as the story progresses, digressing frequently into skewering of the music industry, dissection of his own psyche, and cultural references to the early 2000s. It’s easy to overlook while all this is going on how good the orchestral writing is – I had been worried during the Stewart how well The Knights were going to adapt to Zankel, but in this piece they sounded as though they’d been born there.
The program closed with another movement from Bach, again featuring Thile and Colin Jacobsen. This time, Thile got Jacobsen to flirt back.
