What do medieval music and John Zorn have in common? In the hands of the JACK Quartet, a lot more than you might think. Between concerts on the east and west coasts, the group stopped in Cleveland for two nights of challenging music in unorthodox settings. Their first performance was at the Transformer Station, a small contemporary art gallery, where they played Georg Friedrich Haas’s “In iij. Noct.” in total darkness. The music critic for the local daily confessed to breaking into a claustrophobic sweat and nearly fleeing before being mesmerized by the hour-long cacophony. Modern music will do that to the uninitiated.
“In iij. Noct.” contains a quote from Gesualdo, which provided a thread to the next night’s performance at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a mash-up of early and contemporary music. As the program unfolded, other connections became apparent – in sources of inspiration, varieties of musical language and helpful explanations provided by members of the group involved in building bridges between disparate worlds.
The concert opened with violinist Ari Streisfeld’s arrangement of three short pieces by medieval French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut. Intriguing but uneven, they were ancient in content yet totally modern in form, a synthesis that did not always work. After a sleepy opener offering beautiful sonorities, a stiff reworking of a ballad gave way to a lively finale that sounded very much like a Celtic dance. The approach was interesting and the music expertly played, but overall the melding of genres felt like an uncomfortable fit.
Zorn’s The Remedy of Fortune put the ensemble back on more familiar footing, with impressive results. The title comes from a de Machaut poem and the music included what sounded like several de Mauchat references. But it’s all Zorn, every skittering line, pizzicato pop and lingering sound loop, which the group played with finesse. The JACK players know the piece well – they premiered it at a Zorn tribute in New York last year. Still, their ability to hold together a work that seems constantly on the verge of flying apart is remarkable, and their technique was exquisite. At one point, it seemed impossible that an ultrafine string line could come from four instruments, sounding instead like a whisper of one.
Had Cenk Ergün’s Celare been performed the previous night, the audience would have missed its most interesting effect – passages scored for left hand only. Watching the musicians noiselessly finger the necks of their instruments offered a promising start, though by the end of the piece it seemed little more than a gimmick to break up intermittent phrases and an extended hum that built to a deep, metallic drone. Celare was the first of two world premieres on the program by Ergün, a well-regarded Turkish composer with a taste for electronics. The quartet lent the works gravitas, but couldn’t do much for ideas that essentially sat in one place, never developing any legs.