Album Review: "Serious Business" by Spektral Quartet | An Album a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

And I oop--

WHO: Spektral Quartet
WHAT: New works by Sky Macklay, David Reminick, and Chris Fisher-Lochhead, plus a Haydn quartet
RELEASED: January 2016
LABEL: Sono Luminus

Challenge: I'm going to write this post before my oxtails come out of the pressure cooker in half an hour. For those of you who care: onions, garlic, stock, and red wine (a little bit for the oxtails, a little bit for me 😉). That's it.

Classical music is too damn serious. Have you ever dropped your program during a piece? People will literally look at you as if they want to throw you off a bridge.

Classical music hasn't always been so serious -- you can thank Richard Wagner for that -- but rarely is it overtly funny (barring opera buffa, of course). Haydn had his moments, even Mozart and Beethoven stepped into parody-land once in awhile.

For this album, The Spektral Quartet asked three composers to try their hands at "funny music" with wildly different results. Sky Macklay composed a piece that consists entirely of cadences -- Many Many Cadences as the title so creatively describes. The cadence, of course, functions as a tonal stabilizer. Macklay forces the quartet to hop between cadences with such speed that any sense of stability is lost, even though there is theoretically a "stabilization" every few seconds.

David Reminick chose absurdist poetry as his starting point; The Ancestral Mousetrap requires the quartet to sing a libretto by poet Russell Edson. They sing very well, proving my theory that instrumentalists are sometimes better singers than singers. One of the members sounds like Elvis Costello -- whoever does the bulk of the singing on the 4th movement.

The final premiere on the album, Chris Fisher-Lochhead's Hack, uses the instruments of the quartet to model the sounds produced by standup comedians during their routines. My linguist brain was intrigued. On the album, it doesn't evoke human speech so much, but it's so cool when they map the composition over the comedian's bit. Either way, cool piece.

And then in the middle of all this fun new music came the Haydn "Joke" quartet. I've played it. It's funny. But also, I kind of wish they had commissioned another new piece? I'm not exactly complaining, I'm always in favor of a good performance of a good Haydn quartet. But it also seemed a touch out of place.

Anyway, great album. Go listen. My oxtails are calling.

Review: Dover Quartet and Emanuel Ax at Zankel Hall (and a few updates)

Carnegie didn't have a photographer for the concert, so I'm reusing photos from Dover's

Caramoor concert this summer. Sue me. (Actually, please please don't.) [PC: Gabe Palacio]

WHO: Dover Quartet; Emanuel Ax, piano
WHAT: BRITTEN String Quartet No. 1; BRAHMS String Quartet No. 3; SCHUMANN Piano Quintet
WHERE: Zankel Hall @ Carnegie
WHEN: October 15, 2019 at 7:30pm

First update: I'm on Twitter now! Follow me at https://twitter.com/EmeryKerekes to keep up with all of CMG's adventures!

Second update: I made it to October break in (more or less) one piece. And you know what that means: another concert binge.

I know I've been making noise about a ten-concerts-in-five-days October blitz. But a couple weeks ago, after one too many nights staying up until 3am doing schoolwork, I looked at the list of ten concerts I had planned and only one thought popped into my head:

"This feels like a bad idea."

So I'm only going to seven (maybe eight) concerts this break. And I'm going to blog about all of them, but it's not going to be a formal concert blitz. I'm just going to blog for fun. You know, like a normal blogger -- quality over quantity (what the hell was I on when I thought up of #1Summer50Concerts?). The reviews will come out over the next few weeks.

I love finding ways to put off schoolwork. So, a few weeks ago, when I should have been writing papers, I reached out on a whim to the Carnegie press office, asking if they had any extra tickets for this particular concert. They were so nice, but the gist of what they said was: "Get in line."

Yesterday morning, literally the day of the concert, I got the coveted email: there's an extra ticket, it's yours if you want it, just let me know. I squealed. My breakfast date (Sarah, I know you're reading this) rolled her eyes and didn't talk to me for the rest of the meal.

I dropped my alternate concert plans (we all have those, don't we?) and booked it to Carnegie as soon as my train got in (twenty minutes late, by the way). I sat down and looked around; for the first time in who knows how long, I didn't recognize a single other person in the audience.

I see good concerts all the time. I see great concerts less often, but still regularly. But only once in a while do I see a concert and think, "Wow, that was stupid good."

Well, the Dovers are stupid good.

 PC: Carlin Ma

Okay, confession time. You may recall that I reviewed the Dover Quartet this summer for Opera News, but I couldn't really tell you guys what I thought because I didn't want to give the magazine old news. Well, that review is now in print, so I can say whatever I want. So full disclosure: I've known that the Dover Quartet was fantastic for, like, four months now. But now I can finally say it loud and proud: I'm a diehard Dover fan.

Of course, I'm glad I got to see this whole program. But I'm especially glad that I got to hear the Dovers' take on Britten. Outlandish but not wholly unfollowable, Britten's first quartet proved the perfect canvas for Dover to release their inner cheekiness. The quartet managed to invoke that dry British sense of humor in a way that was full, unfettered, and most importantly, entertaining. The tender violin duets of the first movement were so theatrically interrupted by bawdy prestos that there may as well have been a laugh track. Cellist Camden Shaw's eyebrows tracked the satire through the off-kilter scherzo. The slow movement highlighted violist Milena Pájaro-van de Stadt's flawless playing (to quote the older European gentleman sitting next to me: "Viola playing doesn't get much better than that!"). And the blazing three-minute finale brought everything to a close with adequate pomp and circumstance.

Oh yeah, the Brahms was also great. But like...the Britten.

This is how Barber originally wrote the Adagio for Strings before revising it

twice (once for string orchestra, once for choir). I think it's best for quartet.

And then there was the Schumann. It takes one hell of a quartet to be a match for Emanuel Ax, and I've seen instances where Ax plays with a chamber group that is most certainly not up to his level. But this was perfect. Dover is very new-school, Ax is very old-school, and the collaboration let each explore aspects of the other's playing. The quartet was a little bit warmer and rounder; Ax kept his crisp touch, but was lighter on the pedal than usual. The result was a harmonious tone that could only be described not as the Dover Quartet, not as Emanuel Ax, but as "the Dover Quartet with Emanuel Ax."

The performance was so fantastic that I barely noticed the faint, but ever-present sound of the NQRW trains roaring past the underground Zankel Hall. Whose bright idea was that, again?

[50] Mostly Mozart presents Takács Quartet at Alice Tully Hall | #1Summer50Concerts

Me, finishing something I started for the first time, like, ever

WHO: Takács Quartet; Jeremy Denk, piano

WHAT: MOZART String Quartet No. 21 in D major, K. 575 "Prussian"; BEETHOVEN String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135; DOHNÁNYI Piano Quintet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 1

WHERE: Alice Tully Hall

WHEN: August 5, 2019 at 7:30pm

I'm going to spare you the gritty details, but let me just say this -- I was a little bit emotional at this final concert. And it wasn't just because of the heart-rending slow movements from the Beethoven and the Dohnányi.

As the lights dimmed, and the robo-voice over the loudspeaker told the audience to silence their cell phones, I couldn't help but notice that the sad cavern in my stomach trumped the endorphin rush of triumph.

So much for sparing you the gritty details.

I posted about concert #50 on my Snapchat and got plenty of congratulations, but as I pointed out to all of my loyal followers, it's not over until it's over. Review #50 hasn't hit the web yet. Well, here it is.

I started this project with the most niche concert I could find. Well, it appears I've sold out -- here's a review of, like, one of the most famous quartets in the world.

I went into this concert with a more or less neutral idea of Takács. I listened to one of their Beethoven quartet recordings a while ago. I may have listened to a couple movements of the Bartók cycle at some point. But that's about it.

Takács is not a quartet where you have to call into question whether they play musically, or how well they play well as a quartet. They're obviously very good. The only thing I can do is to ask myself whether they approach the program the way I would. And the answer to that is...kind of?

Takács's approach to Mozart is distinctly different from mine. I love to relish in Mozart's simplicity, striking a balance between imparting my own musical ideas and letting the bright levity of the score speak for itself. Takács erred definitively on the side of the former, and to my ear it seemed a little bit overworked. It didn't help, of course, that their interpretation seemed overly romantic -- their wide, fast vibrato was always audible, which is *probably* not how Mozart would have wanted it. Oh, and it felt like cellist András Fejér was celebrating the upcoming Bartók anniversary a few months early with his short, hatchet-y accompanying strokes. Again, these are all personal objections. Objectively, they played very very well.

Their Beethoven was a little more to my liking -- their approach wasn't so different from that for the Mozart, but it felt a bit more appropriate for the parodistic aspects of Op. 135. Plus, as I said before, that slow movement was to die for (or, in my case, to cry for). And their romantic approach to the Dohnányi was perfectly idiomatic, strengthened by Jeremy Denk's insistently emotional, yet transparent playing.

My mind wasn't blown, but I still left pleased. Takács is eminently reliable. And besides which, I wasn't *really* thinking about the music. I was crying on the inside as the lovely critic sitting next to me (whose name I didn't catch -- he had to run for a train) was waxing poetic about Pekka Kuusisto's abomination of a Four Seasons mashup with Scandinavian folk music.

And now I'm crying on the outside. Stay tuned for the summer wrap-up posts, hopefully coming before my classes start on Wednesday!

[37] Davóne Tines and the Dover Quartet play Mendelssohn, Dvořák, Barber, and Caroline Shaw at Caramoor | #1Summer50Concerts

Perks of reviewing for legit organizations: actual professional photos (PC: Gabe Palacio)

WHO: Davóne Tines, bass-baritone; Dover Quartet
WHAT: MENDELSSOHN Theme and Variations, Scherzo, and Fugue from Four Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 81; BARBER Dover Beach; CAROLINE SHAW By and By; DVOŘÁK String Quartet No. 14 in A-flat major, Op. 105
WHERE: Spanish Courtyard at Caramoor
WHEN: July 12, 2019 at 8:00pm

I'm not going to say much about this performance -- I reviewed this concert for Opera News and I don't want to give away my opinions before it gets published. I'll link the review here once it gets published -- you can read it if you're a subscriber.

In the meanwhile, here are a few things that I didn't get to mention in my review:

• Davóne Tines's stage outfit was a black suit with no shirt. Let me tell you, he ROCKED it.
• There was some action with candles onstage -- Tines lit a candle in the silence between Dover Beach and By and By, and an ill-timed breeze nearly burned the stage tent down.
• At the pre-concert Q&A session, a(n over-)zealous chamber-music camp parent chaperone asked Dover cellist Camden Shaw how he handles it when he gets lost in a performance. After a short pause, he answered in his booming, croony voice, "I don't know, look pretty?"
• Caramoor is absolutely LOVELY. You know why? Because nature is great. NYC almost made me forget that.
• Caroline Shaw was not there or I would have said hi to her this time. I promise.

Stay tuned for the full review!

[12] Stefan Jackiw, Yoonah Kim, Zlatomir Fung, and Conrad Tao play Quartet for the End of Time at Bargemusic | #1Summer50Concerts

Note: that boat is not Bargemusic

WHO: Stefan Jackiw, violin; Yoonah Kim, clarinet; Zlatomir Fung, cello; Conrad Tao, piano
WHAT: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), by Olivier Messiaen
WHERE: Bargemusic
WHEN: June 7, 2019, 7:00pm

I would like to start by saying that Conrad Tao showed up to his own concert in knee-length black capri-chinos, which is probably the biggest power move I've ever witnessed.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Bargemusic is another one of these intimate Brooklyn concert venues that makes you go "awwwwww." Right outside of the joggers-with-strollers haven that is Brooklyn Bridge Park, just down the street from the snaking lines at competing pizzerias Juliana's and Grimaldi's, is a beautiful dock with possibly the most phenomenal, up-close view of the bridges on either side of the East River (pictured above). Tethered to the dock is usually a smattering of party boats, but this Friday night all of the party boats were off loaded with drunken twenty-somethings. Tonight there was only a small white boat with an abandoned ceiling deck and a dent on every surface. That, friends, is Bargemusic.

Inside, visitors find a single, wood-paneled room with a folding table at the front for ticket sales. We slipped in behind a few tourists who were very confused at the fact that the upper deck wasn't used for concertizing (because, after all, grand pianos love nothing more than humidity and unpredictable rain-storms), and took our seats.

I don't usually go crazy for front-row seats -- as I've mentioned in a couple of my previous reviews, I like to hear the sound after it's had a chance to blend in the room. But for some reason, it seemed right for this concert.

Twinning + twin bridges

The musicians were screwing around off to the side of the stage, the only place at Bargemusic that could even mildly be construed as a "backstage area." I use quotation marks because it essentially looks like a mudroom, but without a door or walls -- a couple coat hangers and a couple benches, and the staircase (okay, it's actually like one stair) up to the stage.

For those of you who don't know, Messiaen was drafted into the French army in WWII; he was captured at Verdun and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. Luckily, he had already made something of a name for himself in the musical world, so the army gave him special treatment -- he was given a composition studio with a piano. He wrote the Quatuor entirely at the camp, and it was premiered by him and three of his fellow prisoners outdoors on a rainy January evening.

This is a piece that tests not only every facet of your technique -- how fast you can play, how slow you can play, how in-between you can play -- but first and foremost how much soul and anguish you can impart into your playing. There is nothing uplifting about the Quatuor; even the most beautiful moments are sodden with dissonance and pain.

I can barely put into words the performance that these four phenomenal musicians put forth. At the end of the concerts, my friends and I could do nothing more than look at each other, tears in our eyes, and say, "Wow."

The quartet imparted every bit of distraught passion that Messiaen wrote into the score -- and then some -- into that hour-ish of playing. They were perfectly zoned into each other the whole time, even when they weren't playing. Yoonah Kim's solo clarinet movement (Abyss of the Birds) was extreme in the most wonderful of ways. The infamously long pianissisimo (very very soft) to fortissisimo (very very loud) notes lasted upwards of 30 seconds (thanks to circular breathing -- pushing air out of your mouth while taking more air in through your nose), starting so imperceptibly that I thought her instrument had broken right in front of us on stage.

The leap-of-faith climax-to-meditation moment about two minutes from the end of Zlatomir Fung's solo movement was possibly the most delicate moment of music I have heard so far this summer, save for the congruent moment in Stefan Jackiw's movement -- it's a tie. And all the while, Conrad Tao, without a solo movement for himself, in turn accompanied dutifully and tastefully and shone in his own right, his smart touch ekeing every last timbre out of Bargemusic's Steinway.

I wish I could do justice to this performance with words. But I can't. All I can say is that somehow, everything felt right. The waves sloshing against the dock, the boat rocking at what seemed to be choreographed moments (and I say that as someone who gets violently seasick), even the EDM track that was wafting through the window from afar as the final notes of the final movement sounded. June 7th, 2019, from 7pm to 8:10pm, was a perfect moment.

EDIT: Don't believe me? Cellist Zlatomir Fung just won the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition.

[10] Renee Rosnes Quartet at The Village Vanguard | #1Summer50Concerts

WHO: Renee Rosnes Quartet
WHERE: The Village Vanguard
WHEN: June 5, 2019, 8:30pm

We're one-fifth of the way there guys! Woohoo!

I get a certain satisfaction out of jazz that I simply don't find in classical music. Don't get me wrong, classical music is still my bread and butter, but like, bread and butter doesn't have a whole lot of vitamins and minerals. And I get those vitamins and minerals from jazz.

I love spontaneity. I love music that turns out different every time. I love music that has no "right" way.

So, when judging jazz players, I cherish spontaneity over all else. I want to see them looking at their group-mates, taking cues, and going with the flow.

Renee Rosnes did not deliver.

Rosnes is best known as a composer, but for some reason this set was primarily (if not all -- she didn't announce every piece) arrangements of swing-era hits. It seemed like a safe play, really too safe for a venue like the Vanguard, where modern jazz attracts the biggest audiences. There was nothing "out there," nothing of particular note; just canned arrangements of Fats Waller and contemporaries.

Note: the New Masada Quartet sold out soon after it went on sale. Renee Rosnes didn't even come close.

In a small group setting, each member is personally responsible for keeping the music moving forward -- if one member starts to hesitate, the whole group stalls. It felt like Rosnes was placing the burden of moving the music forward on her bassist (Peter Washington -- he had a terrified expression on his face the entire time, and you could tell which charts he did and didn't know) and her drummer (Carl Allen -- he was on top his music, and his riffs were well-played, if not necessarily the most creative). That got a little bit better towards the end, I will concede.

So you may have noticed that I've only mentioned three of the four quartet members so far, and that's because I wanted to save the best for last. Rosnes's quartet, instead of employing a more conventional saxophone or trumpet, rounds out the quartet with a vibraphone player -- one of few non-vibraphonist-led ensembles that I know of that does this.

Vibes player Steve Nelson wholly upstaged the headliner. His solos were passionate without being cerebral -- you could tell that Nelson was flying by intuition rather than thinking his riffs through, and I would have it no other way. When the rest of the group was ambling along in what seemed like an endless loop of the same eight-bar chord progression, played the same way for the umpteenth time, Nelson's imaginative soloing provided something memorable above a sea of meh. And you could hear him singing (grunting?) along, which was totally endearing.

The thing is, I don't think Renee Rosnes is bad. In the wake of this gig, I listened to a couple of her albums; they were exactly what you would expect if a classically trained pianist wrote jazz, but not in the bad way. She's won Juno awards (think Grammy, but Canadian) for her compositions, and I totally see why. It seemed to me like she was sort of nonchalantly dialing it in for just another set at the Vanguard, and that she didn't really care that much, which in my opinion is kind of unfair to the audience. That said, she did have another show to play that night.

If you want to see Renee Rosnes, perhaps see her under a different leader -- she's playing with the Ron Carter Quartet at Blue Note in a few weeks (July 9-14). If you really want to see Renee Rosnes as headliner, make sure you know what's on the set: arrangements or originals. If it's originals, go; if it's arrangements, skip it.

[7] Baroque in the Fields presents Telemann at St. Luke in the Fields | #1Summer50Concerts

WHO: Baroque in the Fields sponsored by Gotham Early Music Scene
WHAT: Telemann Paris Quartets and solo fantasias
WHERE: Church of St. Luke in the Fields
WHEN: June 2, 2019, 3:00pm

Telemann came at an unfortunate time in music history, at least from a modern perspective. His music is, for the most part, tremendously well-written and creative, but he's been wholly overshadowed by a composer we all know and love: Bach.

The two are, on paper, very similar. They both lived around the same time (though Telemann has a few years over Bach on either end); in fact, Telemann was the first choice for the job of cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, the job that eventually went to Bach and caused him to write so much of his sacred organ and vocal works. Telemann ended up with a similar, better-paid job in Hamburg.

Twelve solo violin works to Bach's six; twelve solo flute works to Bach's one; twelve fantasias for solo bass instrument (viola da gamba as opposed to Bach's cello) to Bach's six; there is no question that Telemann was equally prolific to Bach. And I would argue that Bach is not "better" in the strictest sense, he was just lucky enough to have fiery revivalists on his side (namely Felix Mendelssohn in the 1820s).

I'm always thrilled when people choose to put on Telemann concerts. It feels to me like they're uncovering a hidden gem, one that people don't hear nearly often enough. So I dragged my friend to this lovely, free (free!) Sunday afternoon concert in the West Village. From what I gathered, the concert was another effort of the fine folks over at Gotham Early Music Scene: bringing early music to the masses since who knows when.

On tap were a smattering of Telemann's Paris Quartets, published in two volumes (1730 and 1738). The catch is that Telemann didn't actually visit Paris until 1737; the first set of quartets is no more Parisian than anything else coming out of Hamburg at the time. But, the second set was so associated with Telemann's celebrity visit to Paris that they were all sort of lumped together in history's ever-reductive eye. A few of Telemann's aforementioned solo works rounded out the program.

"What do you mean you've never heard of me? I'll have you know I'm VERY famous in Paris."

Can you tell I resent the fact that we didn't learn about Telemann in my music history class? I'm having flashbacks to the time I asked my TA why we skipped over Telemann and it ended in a ten-minute rant session about how good Telemann is. And that all happened by shouting/sign-languaging across an opera pit. Oop.

Some parts of this particular performance shone brightly. Flautist Immanuel Davis, a frequent duo partner of Berthold Kuijken (a member of the Kuijken family, three of whose five children are partially credited with the recent resurgence of historically-informed performance). His solo pieces, two fantasias played without pause, were impressively virtuosic without compromising the flavor of the music. His slower passages oozed aristocracy and nobility, while his faster runs were nimble and deft. In the quartets, he shone both as a leader and an instrumentalist.

Harpsichordist Dongsok Shin's fulfilled both of his roles in the performance -- first and foremost as an accompanist, but later on also a soloist -- with admirable flair. His continuo underpinnings were never too flashy so as to take away from the solo players, but were always reliable and tactfully timed. As a soloist, he approached his fantasia with restrained abandon, milking every ounce of passion he could out of a temperamental instrument like the harpsichord.

My friend: "That's A LOT of Telemann." Me: "TELEMANN TIME!!!!!"

Motomi Igarashi, the viola da gamba player for this performance, had her highs and lows. In the slower passages, her interpretation and tone were impressively strong; in the faster passages though, the bow seemed to often slip out from under her. Of course, I should give her the benefit of the doubt because the gamba parts for the Paris Quartets are twice as hard as the flute part and the violin part combined -- read: unplayable by mortals. Igarashi is a specialist on the lirone, an instrument that is like if the gamba could only play chords and nothing else; considering her strengths and weaknesses, I can easily see her being a master of this unusual instrument.

Violinist Leah Gale Nelson, though equally impassioned to her peers, fell a bit short in the technique department. It appeared that she was putting an inordinate amount of pressure on her bow, causing notes to crack or -- worse yet -- not to sound at all. That, combined with her sometimes *interpretive* intonation, detracted from an otherwise musical and enjoyable performance.

I'm of the opinion that it's hard to go wrong with a free concert, and I'm very glad I happened upon this one -- shout-out to Fred, the greeter from the Abendmusik concert I went to last Friday, for letting me know about this concert! Overall, I'm glad I went and I'm looking forward to GEMS's next season.