Spektral Quartet: Clara Lyon (violin), Theo Espy (violin), Doyle Armbrust (viola), Russell Rolen (cello); JuliaHolter: voice
New Amsterdam Records
Out this Friday, March 3rd, via New Amsterdam Records is composer Alex Temple’s cycle Behind the Wallpaper. Vocalist Julia Holter joins the Spektral Quartet in this song cycle inspired by Temple’s gender transition.
Holter, as always, is a marvel, with expressive, liquescent singing throughout her soprano voice’s range. The Spektral Quartet is given a variety of styles to play, from doleful lyricism reminiscent of Shostakovich’s string quartets to post-minimalism. The musical smorgasbord reminds me in places of Elvis Costello’s collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters. Temple is fluent in marshaling these materials. Behind the Wallpaper deals with a significant event in Temple’s life, yet her touch is light and lyrics affirming. Recommended.
Spektral Quartet Clara Lyon, Maeve Feinberg, violin; Doyle Armbrust, viola; Russell Rolen, cello
Sono Luminus CD, 2021
Enigma, the first string quartet by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, arrives after a spate of engaging chamber works that have often featured strings, but never in this most traditional configuration. The piece has essentially two very different experiences to offer to the listener. The one considered here is a well engineered CD recording with detailed antiphony that gives a sense of the spatial dimensions of Enigma’s live incarnation, a multimedia work in a 360 degree full-dome theater space, with visuals provided by Sigurdur Gudjonsson. Premiered at the Kennedy Center and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Enigma is likely to have audiences on the edge of their seats.
In her informative program note, Thorvaldsdottir indicates that the piece is about both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. This is an ideal vantage point from which to consider Engima. The composer is well versed in advanced string techniques. The granularity of details such as microtones, harmonics, and bow pressure, are nested in sweeping modal harmony. The first movement reveals these details gradually.
Glissandos, especially the gull’s cry effect, announce the second movement, to which are added pizzicato and angular gestures to give the underlying grid a nudge in tempo. Grinding bow pressure and a fleet viola solo yield to the modal bass register harmonies found in the previous movement, a more subdued return to harmonics and pizzicato, and then an addition of sepulchral octaves paired with the return of the viola’s solo. Cluster chords and a narrow melody ratchet up the intensity against insistent bass octaves to close.
The final movement overlaps glissandos and harmonics to create an altissimo register colloquy only occasionally interrupted by the cello in the bass register, playing a skeleton of the first movement’s harmony. Gradually, the registers are filled in and a keening melody announces the return of the modal harmony first revealed in the opening. There are slow percussive blows that articulate a polyrhythmic grid and a subtle underpinning of bow pressure that provides another articulation. A descending line joins the microtonally tuned violin solo, providing tangy dissonance against the harmonic ground beneath. Synthetic scales then provide dissonances and augmented seconds that alter the mode (a nod to the title, it is perhaps the most enigmatic turn in the piece). Solo harmonics then outline the harmony and repeated notes create a fadeout to close the work.
The Spektral Quartet performs both the micro and macro levels of the piece with an admirable sense of pacing and keen attention to detail. Enigma is our first Best of 2021 pick.
The Spektral Quartet takes advantage of the open-ended playing time of a digital release to create effectively a double album for their latest recording, Experiments in Living. While double albums often suffer from a bit of flab, this one doesn’t have an extraneous moment. It is a well curated release that attends to meaning making in contemporary music with a spirit that is both historically informed and deeply of this moment.
A clever extra-musical addition to the project is a group of Tarot cards that allow the listener to ‘choose their own adventure,’ making their way through the various pieces in different orderings. These are made by the artist/musician øjeRum. The tarot cards may be seen on the album’s site.
It might seem strange to begin an album of 20/21 music with Johannes Brahms’s String Quartet Op. 51, no. 1 in C-minor (1873). However, Arnold Schoenberg’s article “Brahms as Progressive” makes the connection between the two composers clear. It also demonstrates Spektral’s comfort in the standard repertoire. They give an energetic reading of the quartet with clear delineation of its thematic transformations, a Brahms hallmark.
Schoenberg is represented by his Third String Quartet (1927). His first quartet to use 12-tone procedures, it gets less love in the literature than the oft-analyzed combinatorics of the composer’s Fourth String Quartet, but its expressive bite still retains vitality over ninety years later. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931), an under-heralded masterpiece of the 20th century, receives one of the best recordings yet on disc, its expressive dissonant counterpoint rendered with biting vividness.
Sam Pluta’s Flow State/Joy State is filled with flurries of glissandos, microtones, and harmonics to create a thoroughly contemporary sound world punctuated by dissonant verticals. One of Pluta’s most memorable gestures employs multiple glissandos to gradually make a chord cohere, only to have subsequent music skitter away. Charmaine Lee’s Spinals incorporates her own voice, replete with lip trills and sprechstimme that are imitated by string pizzicato and, again, glissandos.
Spektral is joined by flutist Claire Chase on Anthony Cheung’s “Real Book of Fake Tunes,” which combines all manner of effects for Chase with jazzy snips of melody and writing for quartet that is somewhat reminiscent of the techniques found in the Schoenberg, but with a less pervasively dissonant palette. Cheung’s writing for instruments is always elegantly wrought, and Chase and Spektral undertake an excellent collaboration. One could imagine an entire album for this quintet being an engaging listen.
The recording’s title track is George Lewis’s String Quartet 1.5; he wrote a prior piece utilizing quartet but considers this his first large-scale work in the genre. Many of the techniques on display in Pluta’s piece play a role here as well. Lewis adds to these skittering gestures, glissandos, and microtones the frequent use of various levels of bow pressure, including extreme bow pressure in which noise is more present than pitch. The latter crunchy sounds provide rhythmic weight and accentuation that offsets the sliding tones. Dovetailing glissandos create a blurring effect in which harmonic fields morph seamlessly. The formal design of the piece is intricate yet well-balanced. More string quartets, labeled 2.5 and 3.5, are further contributions by Lewis to the genre. One hopes that Spektral will take them up as well – their playing of 1.5 is most persuasive.
