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    Review: A Musician’s Portrait, as Both Composer and Pianist

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    At the Miller Theater at Columbia University, the composer Amy Williams joined the JACK Quartet in playing her chamber music.Whether as a composer or as a pianist, Amy Williams is first and foremost, in her heart of hearts, a chamber musician.“Chamber music is my love when it comes to music, as a listener and performer,” she said in an onstage interview during a Composer Portraits concert devoted to her work at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday evening.Miller’s composer portraits tend to focus on pieces for small groups, and therefore represent some artists more fully than others. Williams, born in 1969 and now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, has, in her relatively tight body of work, written little but small-group pieces. Many of them involve the piano, which brought her to Thursday’s concert as a performer, too, and gave the audience another crucial facet of her musical life. (She is the longtime half, with Helena Bugallo, of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo.)The four pieces on the program at Miller were for combinations of piano and strings, and featured the JACK Quartet, which performed on its own, as part of a piano quintet and with two of its members joining Williams in a trio.Williams and JACK — the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, the violist John Pickford Richards and the cellist Jay Campbell — have collaborated for over a decade and form a happy partnership. The quartet has the pristine clarity to execute all the challenges Williams calls for: the supersoft passages and tight coordination; the complex, exposed unison rhythms; the variety of touch among the four players; and a mood both easygoing and changeable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JACK Quartet Commits to Finding the Music

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      Its stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“Can your hiccups be even bigger?” the composer Natacha Diels asked the JACK Quartet on a recent morning.“I was thinking there were differences in how you were leaning back on the flamingos,” she added, and, addressing the cellist, said: “Jay, your owls are a little unconvincing. Maybe a little more jowl in your owl?”Somehow, this bizarre code would translate into meticulously uproarious art. Diels and the JACK had come together in an airy room at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan to rehearse her “Beautiful Trouble,” a five-part piece premiering in February that brings together surreal short films and just-as-absurdist live performance.Diels calls for the four musicians to hiccup, as well as make clicks, dings, odd little movements, head rolls and maniacal grins, among much else. Flamingos and owls are drawn in the score as notation for a full-body unfurling motion and shudder. At that morning rehearsal, the JACK’s usual instruments — violins, viola and cello — were still in their cases at the edge of the room.A few days before, I had spent time with the venerable Emerson String Quartet as it prepared to give its final concerts, with music of Beethoven and Schubert. Compared to that, this JACK rehearsal didn’t feel like a different group or a different piece; it felt like a different world.“The performance practice can be kind of far away from the Classical-Romantic continuum,” Jay Campbell, the quartet’s cellist, said with winking understatement in an interview alongside his colleagues a week later. “And we gravitate to that.”“That” can mean a lot of different things. The group — Campbell, the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, and the violist John Pickford Richards, all in their mid-30s to mid-40s — can do, with equal aplomb, austerely earthy arrangements of Renaissance and medieval pieces, the eclectic folk jam of Gabriella Smith’s “Carrot Revolution” and Diels’s fanciful choreography.John Zorn’s ferociously fast thickets of notes and Catherine Lamb’s glacially shifting microtonal drones are both JACK specialties; on Friday, the group will perform Lamb’s 90-minute magnum opus “divisio spiralis” at Yale.With that sprawling stylistic range and its technical mastery, its enthusiastic curiosity about eminent and student composers alike, its precision and passion, the JACK has, since its founding in 2005, become one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“There’s almost nothing they can’t do,” said the composer Amy Williams, who is at work on a new JACK commission. “So in a way, it’s like writing for electronics, with no human limitations. That can be exciting, and also terrifying.”The soprano Barbara Hannigan, who has toured with the group, said: “It’s a very disciplined yet manic virtuosity. And somehow they’re also very calm at the center of all that virtuosity. They are super, super centered. I’ve worked with quartets with a specialty in modern repertoire, but there’s nobody like JACK.”The group formed in the heady atmosphere for new music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 2000s. The players in the original lineup — Richards, Otto, the violinist Ari Streisfeld and the cellist Kevin McFarland — were united by decisive encounters with the work of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, a master of sonic extremes. Lachenmann traveled to Toronto to coach three of the JACK members in his first quartet, “Gran Torso,” and the group flew to a festival in Mexico with other Eastman musicians to continue working with him.“I am their father, or something — their grandfather,” Lachenmann, who turns 88 this month, said with a laugh recently. “They were totally precise, and very musical. And there is for me one word that is very important: They are serene. When I met them, immediately it was clear, the honesty and the concentration. I don’t find better groups for my music than them.”Otto recalled, of their early work on Lachenmann’s third quartet, “Grido”: “We could sense that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Just the depth of this music — I’d never encountered something like that before, the thought that we could just continue practicing this piece for a really long time.”JACK performing at the Tribeca New Music Festival 2010 with its original lineup: from left, Ari Streisfeld, Otto, Kevin McFarland and Richards.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesThey chose to call the group “JACK,” an acronym of their first names — at first a jokey nod to Lachenmann, whose “Grido” is named after the members of the Arditti Quartet. But the players also liked its slightly ironic all-American quality and its modesty.In the first years, the group played only sporadic concerts, and they weren’t usually glamorous. The JACK often performed at the Tank, then on Church Street in Lower Manhattan, where cockroaches would sometimes scamper over the musicians’ feet while they played.Lachenmann put in a good word with WDR, the influential radio network in Cologne, Germany, which invited the JACK to play and record all four of Iannis Xenakis’s quartets, a feat not yet attempted. Released in 2009 as part of Mode Records’s complete Xenakis project, it made the group’s reputation.“We got paid to record it, which is crazy,” Richards said. “And that album introduced JACK to a lot of people.”It established the quartet as youthful masters of daunting modernism, as did a live recording of a 2011 performance of works by Xenakis (“Tetras,” an intense calling card), Ligeti, Cage and Matthias Pintscher at Wigmore Hall in London. But the flood of repertory and touring soon grew trying.“It’s hard to do more than 70 or 80 concerts a year with all new pieces,” Richards said. McFarland wanted to move to Colorado, where his partner lived, and Streisfeld wanted to stop traveling so much and take a steadier teaching position.They left the group in 2016, and while Otto and Richards were committed to keeping JACK going, it was, Richards recalled, “surprisingly hard to discover people who wanted to throw their whole lives into it.” But Campbell and Wulliman, both well regarded in the cozy contemporary-music community, fit the bill.“I had been playing in professional new-music ensembles in Chicago,” Wulliman recalled. “But to sit down with these guys to read through ‘Tetras’ — whoa, I have never, ever, ever experienced anything like that. Being able to just get through something that easily. The ease of the music moving forward.”The JACK is not one of those businesslike quartets that travels separately and meets up just for soundchecks and performances. “I still like spending time with them,” Wulliman said. They go on hikes and search out new restaurants together on tour — and, when road trips are involved, always sit in the same configuration in the car, with Richards at the wheel.The four have mock fights about things like whether they should play Ralph Shapey’s astringent music. (“I’m dying to do Shapey,” Otto said; “I’d rather die,” said Wulliman.) But when they’re rehearsing, they speak in genial fragments, completing one another’s sentences and doing much more playing than debating.Going through an arrangement of a piece by the 16th-century composer Nicola Vicentino, Otto, who was doing a harsh, very contemporary-sounding bow stroke, asked, “Does it feel over the top with the sweeping stuff?”JACK rehearsing in San Francisco recently. Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWulliman thought a second, and answered, “I’m not ready to pass judgment yet.” And they moved on.In the interview, Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words. Sometimes, early on, we would get overly conceptual or just talkative at rehearsals, and it wasn’t really that productive.”Since those beginning years, using the Kronos Quartet as a model, JACK has been organized as a nonprofit — Lachenmann co-signed the articles of incorporation — to allow it to raise money, commission pieces and start initiatives on its own, rather than waiting for partner institutions.“It feels like institutions are just a little behind,” Campbell said. “I want to be more in front of it.”In 2018, the group became the quartet in residence at Mannes, a milestone for its artistic and financial stability. Its budget in 2010 was $120,000; it’s now $700,000, separate from the members’ Mannes salaries — and large enough for JACK to have hired a full-time executive director, Julia Bumke, in 2020.As its 20th anniversary approaches, the group is focusing on expanding its fund-raising to include more individual givers amid the grants and foundation support, as well as fortifying its already robust commissioning activities, including the JACK Studio program, which offers funding for new scores as well as a range of mentorship and performance opportunities.When the quartet believes in a composer, it truly commits. “As we worked together,” Catherine Lamb said, “something clicked: ‘I can really write what I want to write for these people. I don’t have to hold back. I can explore what I want to explore.’ So I let myself go.”The result was “divisio spiralis,” an epic, 13-part experiment in delicate yet rending, mesmerizing harmonic changes that demands hyper-exact intonation to make its impact.“The last time I heard them play it live,” Lamb said, “I was overwhelmed by how much it had grown since the premiere in 2019. They had more clarity in reaching the sound colors together, finding the right kinds of balances. It’s more and more seamless, more and more musical.”That commitment to finding the music — the sheer beauty — in what could be merely exercises in complexity, to treating every composer like a distinct style that can be ever more fully inhabited, is what sets JACK apart.The group said it was a little intimidated by the difficulty of Amy Williams’s music. But Williams, whose new JACK piece relies heavily on hocketing, the medieval technique of alternating rhythms so lines interlock like a zipper, said that was unlikely.“They have absorbed so much music — working with students, premiering pieces, large-scale composer projects,” she said. “It’s quite extraordinary how much they’re processing. Challenging them is no longer on the table.” More

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      Capturing John Zorn at 70: One Concert Is Just a Start

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      The Miller Theater at Columbia University began a series of programs to celebrate this restless and eclectic musician’s milestone year.John Zorn may have turned 70 this month, but he looks younger.He sounds younger, too — energetic and irrepressible. Recent recordings of Zorn’s music, issued on his Tzadik label, include the swinging, mystic patterns of “Homenaje a Remedios Varo” and the brightly, largely consonant chamber guitar writing of “Nothing Is as Real as Nothing.” The coming “Parrhesiastes” showcases his trademark ferocity.Zorn has been taking his stylistically varied live performances on the road to celebrate this birthday. His packed calendar includes a recent multiday festival in San Francisco, a daylong marathon at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and appearances at Roulette in Brooklyn.On Thursday, the Miller Theater at Columbia University took its turn, with the first in a series of “composer portrait” concerts that continue into November. Throughout the evening, this most hyperactive of American composers could be seen bounding with ease between the stage and his seat in the audience.With a ringleader’s zeal, Zorn introduced different groupings of musicians. During the changes between pieces, he leaped up onstage to describe his childhood interest in, say, the Dada writer Tristan Tzara, whose theatrical work “The Gas Heart” provided inspiration for Zorn’s mini-opera of the same name, performed on Thursday.Befitting his reputation, the pacing of motivic events inside that work and others tended to be fast and furious. Yet each piece also communicated joy — and a certain fellowship among the interpreters who had spent time together mastering Zorn’s rigorous, change-on-a-dime aesthetic.Here, the music featured the barreling riffs familiar from a lot of his chamber works, jazz tunes and extreme rock. But I came away from the Miller show dazzled by way in which a supple new approach to beauty has established itself in the past decade or two of his output. (Something similar has been going on with Zorn’s saxophone playing — not least in his New Masada Quartet, which has held crowds rapt at the Village Vanguard and Roulette in recent seasons.)Thursday’s concert began with a two-trumpet fanfare, “Circe” (2019), rendered with panache by Peter Evans and Sam Jones. The shortest piece on the program at a mere three minutes, it was also the most consistently hardcore. Yet its aggressive motifs were precisely coordinated — and given the independence to roam, even amid the overall feel of maelstrom. In between piercing trills, you could perceive and appreciate the way units of melody passed between the players.From left, the violinists Christopher Otto and David Fulmer, the cellists Jay Campbell and Michael Nicolas, and the violist John Pickford Richards, who formed a quintet for Zorn’s “Sigil Magick.”Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre at Columbia UniversityThe three other pieces on the program, all from 2020, focused on Zorn’s writing for strings. Each involved one or more members of the JACK Quartet. (Austin Wulliman, a violinist with the group, was not available, but David Fulmer substituted with aplomb.) And there were other guests, including the cellist Michael Nicolas in the string quintet “Sigil Magick.”In that work, listeners were offered short, droning chords, as well as polyphonic ensemble passages of whipsawing extended technique. But players within the quintet also diverged to present deliriously contrasting material: At one such juncture, while two parts held down a static pattern with a parched, brittle approach to sound production, the violinist Christopher Otto launched into sumptuously singing parlando.At the end of the concert, the violist Yura Lee joined the JACK players and Nicolas to create a sextet for — deep breath — “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science.” At over 20 packed minutes, this struck me as one of the loveliest and most widely ranging chamber music pieces in Zorn’s considerable catalog.In addition to moments of chromatic density, the work welcomed gently strummed early music melody into its soundscape. At another point, both cellists bowed doleful yet gorgeous patterns near the top of the necks of their instruments, close to the tuning pegs, collaborating on a slightly sour intonation that seemed in line with medieval tunings. Given this range, “Prolegomena” shares something with recent Zorn string quartets, like “The Alchemist,” which JACK has recorded with his other quartets (for a planned release on Tzadik in 2024).In between the quintet and sextet came Zorn’s adaptation of “The Gas Heart.” This was Zorn in absurdist-opera mode. Here, the JACK cellist Jay Campbell and Nichols joined two percussionists — Sae Hashimoto and Ches Smith — to form the cast. Smith provided expertly swinging rhythms at a traditional kit, but also slurped water and appeared to be operating a device that played back giddy laughter; when not playing vibraphone or other pitched percussion, Hashimoto could be seen torturing a pillow with a long whip or sawing a wooden board.The cello music — often smartly, subtly amplified — was sometimes grim and gravely, and produced by bowing below the bridge. But there were also delicate moments for the strings, often positioned in contrast to some of the wildness of the percussionists. This was all funny, as intended. Every bar, though, seemed as carefully deliberate as in the more obviously “profound” string music of “Prolegomena.”And here may be a secret of Zorn’s longevity: A piece may tend comic or grave, but every moment is intensely felt.Earlier on Thursday, rumors had swirled online about the possible arrival of the Tzadik catalog on streaming services. On Friday, Zorn’s distributor, Redeye, confirmed that the move would happen, next week. This is big news, given how long Zorn has held out against streaming — and given the amount of care he takes in designing his physical releases.However you access it — on recordings or in person — Zorn’s recent catalog is worth seeking out. This fall, the Miller will host Zorn and his New Masada Quartet, on a bill with one of his great metal groups, Simulacrum. Then comes a program of his music with the star soprano Barbara Hannigan.The implicit message: One night is probably insufficient in encapsulating this artist’s range. But it could, as on Thursday, provide a riotously good start. More

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      At Time Spans Festival, New York Shows Off New Music

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      The festival is a bright spot on the August calendar, with casual yet tightly plotted concerts of modern and contemporary music.Classical music’s global summer season is full of destination-worthy presentations. In August, New York makes a contribution: The Time Spans Festival, a modern and contemporary-music event that is the equal of anything on the international circuit.So after a couple weeks covering operas and starry premieres in Europe, I made sure to be home in New York for the first shows in this year’s festival, which runs through Aug. 26. It all takes place in the refreshingly cool, subterranean hall of the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen.Saturday’s opener was dedicated to works by the 20th-century composer Luigi Nono. This Italian modernist worked frequently with the resident electronic specialists of the SWR Experimentalstudio, a German public radio electronic studio from Freiburg. At the DiMenna Center, this group collaborated with musicians in Ensemble Experimental, giving these performances the feeling of deep investment and institutional know-how.Brad Lubman conducting the Nono concert.George EtheredgeFirst up was “Omaggio a Emilio Vedova” from 1961. A fixed-media piece — for tape only — it was spatialized in the hall by the SWR technicians, with eight speakers surrounding the audience. And though just over four minutes in length, this slashing, vertiginous work made a strong impression: its brief metallic shards of prerecorded sound revolving around audience-member eardrums with a grace that made Nono’s supposedly harsh aesthetic seem balletic.The short presentation also blasted into dust the recent, expensive and much-ballyhooed spatial-music presentation at the Shed, the Sonic Sphere. There, audience members were hoisted up into a giant dome, only to listen to a surround-speaker system with blurry low-end sonic fidelity. At the DiMenna Center, listeners kept their feet on the underground floor, but the whirling sound production was pristine — and transporting.When live instrumentalists from Ensemble Experimental joined the fray, this sense of fun continued, even during gnomic works with generally quiet dynamics, like Nono’s “A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum” (1985).Maruta Staravoitava (flute) Andrea Nagy (clarinet) and Noa Frenkel on Saturday.George EtheredgeJozsef Bazsinka.George EtheredgeHere, the subtle electronic processing of live instrumental playing was a consistent delight: When astringent live notes, played by a bass flutist and a bass clarinetist, came back around in the electronic part, they seemed somehow softened by the electronic merging and transformation. With those newly mellowed-out sounds crawling across the back of your head — courtesy of speakers in the rear of the room — the piece then turned its bass clarinetist loose, by asking for yawping but controlled overblowing from the reed player. (Here it was Andrea Nagy making those striated and punchy sounds.)That piece and one that came next — “Omaggio a Gyorgy Kurtag” — have been recorded on a fine SWR release on the Neos imprint. But that’s a two-channel stereo recording. Here, as led by the guest conductor Brad Lubman, both took on greater depth in the immersive surround-sound setting.The festival’s second night kept the European-experimentalist trend going, but in a fully acoustic fashion, with the JACK Quartet’s renditions of the second and third string quartets by Helmut Lachenmann.Electronic processing of live instrumental playing in the Nono concert was a consistent delight.George EtheredgeSpeaking from the stage between pieces, the violist John Pickford Richards described Lachenmann’s reputation as someone who makes Western classical instruments seethe and twitch in ways previously inconceivable. (His influence can be felt on other German composers of his generation, as well as adventurous American composers like David Sanford.)Richards also noted that “Grido,” the third quartet, which the ensemble had just played, was one that the JACK instrumentalists had performed together before they were a formal group. And so they think of Lachenmann as a father of the ensemble.That deep familial relationship was already apparent in JACK’s reading of that third quartet. That performance seemed to say: Forget everything you think you know about how weird this guy’s sound-production techniques are; just get lost in the confident, persuasive flow of these unusual ideas.

      Complete String Quartets (mode267) by Helmut LachenmannAs on a recording for the Mode label, the JACK players proved they know how to get the most out of this pathbreaking music, savoring the crisscrossing flurries of steely motifs. (They did it with enviable clarity, creating a spatialized feel through purely acoustic means.) At other points, the violinist Christopher Otto in particular seemed to relish the brief touches of more familiar vibrato that Lachenmann allows into the piece.Lachenmann’s second quartet, which on Sunday followed the third, came across more like a notebook of ideas — ideas that would later find their ideal expression in the third quartet. Still, it was a pleasure to experience such a focused, hourlong tour through this composer’s string writing.George EtheredgeAnd audiences seem to have caught on to the Time Spans model — of casual yet tightly plotted concerts, usually lasting an hour to 90 minutes, with no intermission. This weekend’s programs looked close to sold out. And affordable tickets, just $20, are still available to most remaining shows.There are no dress codes, and no complicated advance-festival planning is required. In this way, Time Spans is part of the (necessary) genre-wide effort to make classical music more approachable. Crucially, the festival does that assuming that new audiences can handle new music. More

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      Review: A Portrait Reveals a Composer With a Dramatic Edge

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      The Miller Theater’s Composer Portraits series returns with a program of Liza Lim’s music, featuring the JACK Quartet.The last time I sat down with the music of the Australian composer Liza Lim, it was to take in the broad swath of her operatic catalog — collected last year by the Elision Ensemble in its “Singing in Tongues.” That release, which included Lim’s avant-garde take on “The Oresteia,” left me hungry to hear more of her theatrical music.Alas, a Lim program at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday didn’t feature any of it. Still, the concert — the Miller’s first Composer Portrait of the season — confirmed the ways in which Lim can create drama through experimental conceits.The program offered the U.S. premiere of her “String Creatures,” written for the JACK Quartet. It also featured the cellist Jay Campbell, a member of that pathbreaking group, in the 2016 solo work “an ocean beyond earth.”Or was it a solo? In “ocean,” each string of the cello is outfitted with a cotton thread attached to the strings of a nearby violin. Campbell occasionally tugged on those threads, vibrating the violin strings independently of his instrument; at other points, he alternately bowed the connective threads and the cello’s strings. The result was an invitation to consider a range of discrete ways to produce sound across the two instruments.That work was also a good example of what distinguishes Lim. Her approach is flush with aspects of contemporary experimental music that, in other hands, threaten to become clichés (like harsh, grating string sounds and breathy extended technique). But Lim uses those now-familiar timbres as suspense-fomenting moments in music that has a sure sense of proportion — and an unmistakable direction.In “ocean,” that dramatic trajectory resulted in ever-firmer evocations of the cello’s more booming stature — with Campbell gradually moving beyond initial, wispy, cotton-string disturbances. After that came gentle yet direct bowing; then, finally, forceful pizzicato.Lim’s expressive writing takes on more power with the addition of more instruments. At the outset of the three-movement “String Creatures,” country-western “chop” accents — a percussive bowing of the strings that is repeated for rhythmic effect — lent the music propulsive momentum.There were other highlights in the piece for the JACK players: The violinist Christopher Otto had multiple, sinewy solo features; a brief lullaby teased at the end of the first movement appeared later on as a spotlight for Campbell, progressing with what sounded like microtonal intervals.Yet ghostly ensemble textures for the entire quartet were the highlight. At times, the group seemed to fall in lock step, cohering around a mechanical Minimalism. But while keeping the hushed dynamics steady, Lim bent individual string lines away from the expected polyphonic patterns.It was all gripping material. So now, after an evening like this, who will bring her richly designed dramas to New York?Composer Portraits: Liza LimPerformed on Thursday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Manhattan. More

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      One Night, Several String Quartet Premieres

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      The JACK Quartet and the Danish String Quartet presented new works that nodded to the past and spoke to the present.On Thursday evening, two eminent string quartets presented premieres in New York. At Merkin Hall, the JACK Quartet unveiled Patricia Alessandrini’s “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” Khyam Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in” and George Lewis’s “String Quartet 4.5.” Not far away, at Zankel Hall, the Danish String Quartet paired Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” with Lotta Wennäkoski’s new “Pige.” Our critics were at both events.JACK QuartetYou always remember your first.The first live concert you attended after the initial pandemic lockdown, that is. So the JACK Quartet will always hold a place in my heart. But after that outdoor performance, at the Morris Museum in New Jersey in August 2020, it was back to a long digital-streaming relationship for me and the group. So seeing them in person again on Thursday evening, almost two years later, felt like another of this era’s many happy reunions.Appearing at Merkin at the tail end of “Bridges,” a series presented by the Kaufman Music Center and the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, the JACK — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violins; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello — now had optimal indoor acoustics to show off their uncanny clarity and agility in these three premieres.In the cheekily titled, 12-minute “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” the quartet’s skittering, airy playing is translated, through electronic processing, into fragments of recordings of works from the classical canon, which seem to mistily surround the live sounds.The results might have been clearer over the super-sophisticated speaker system at Empac, the experimental arts center in upstate New York where the piece was workshopped earlier this month. At Merkin, you could make out a chorus in the first section — heard faintly, as if from a distant room. In the final section, “Appendix 2” (there is no “Appendix 1”), the electronics were still very quiet, and impossible to identify, but had a certain density, a soft sumptuousness.A trembling motif passes around the four instruments in Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in,” gradually overlapping in waves for a kind of dusky, shaggy old-school Minimalism. The piece feels shorter than its 19 minutes, the music receding and rebuilding with a carefully wrought naturalness, and ending in a serene coda of slow, hazy unison chords.Before the JACK played his “String Quartet 4.5,” Lewis — the eminent composer and scholar recently named the next artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble — said from the stage that he wrote the piece “against complacency,” as a reminder for audiences to “stay alert.” This is a political posture, but it’s also a declaration of Barnum-style showmanship, and the 17-minute work richly delivered, commanding attention like a ringmaster conjuring acrobats.The acts included sudden slides; a long unison squeal; a tiny, precious duet of little scratches between the first violin and the cello; and a passage of nearly lilting, Mendelssohnian delicacy. The other players twinklingly twittered as Campbell’s hand slid up and down the neck of his cello, for a woozy ondes Martenot effect. Near the end, crunchy grinding gave way to balletic glassiness. It was a spectacularly varied circus — and serious fun. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe JACK Quartet, from left: Austin Wulliman, Christopher Otto, Jay Campbell and John Pickford Richards on Thursday at Merkin Hall.Joan JastrebskiDanish String QuartetThe men of the Danish String Quartet — the violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and the cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin — are masters of juxtaposition.Their enlightening “Prism” albums trace lines from Bach’s fugues to late Beethoven and works of the 20th century. Another series, “Doppelgänger,” pairs Schubert’s final quartets (and his finest piece of chamber music, the String Quintet in C) with premieres that respond to them.“Doppelgänger” has had a delayed start in New York. Because of the pandemic, Part I will arrive here last; on Thursday, the second installment came first, featuring the famous “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810) and Wennäkoski’s “Pige.”Nørgaard introduced “Death and the Maiden” as “almost the definition of the Romantic string quartet,” though you wouldn’t have guessed that at first in the group’s interpretation — a controlled accumulation that built toward a sprinting and desperate tarantella.This work’s nickname comes from Schubert’s earlier song “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” whose funereal opening serves as the theme for the second movement. Sørensen, as the first violin, was a stand-in for the Maiden, his articulation at the start delicate, even reticent. As the music becomes more animated, it lashes out and retreats, torn between fury and woe; the Danish players opted for restraint, their command of the score absolute but their passion understated.In the second movement, they revealed the power in Schubert’s pauses, particularly with a patient ending, like an attempt to prolong its moment of peace. That couldn’t last forever, though: At the coda of that tarantella finale, here impressively cohesive amid increasingly frantic chorales and unstable runs, Death arrives in a sudden minor-key turn, delivered in grandly Romantic fashion.“Pige” (Danish for “Girl”) shifts the focus from Death to the Maiden. As response pieces go, this one reflects less on the quartet — though nods to it abound, as in a version of Schubert’s long-short-short rhythm — and more on the original song. Schubert’s quartet never quotes the Maiden’s verse, which gets its due in the first movement of “Pige,” a series of phrases that start and disintegrate in wispy fragments and fading arpeggios.Throughout, Wennäkoski balances extended technique and expressive lyricism, sometimes layering the two, but bringing the instruments together for affecting silences. Then comes the bright, episodic finale, “The Girl and the Scrapbook,” which takes flight with up-bow flourishes and a casual reference to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In the final measure, the cellist (Schubert’s voice for Death in the quartet) tears a sheet of paper — “slowly and continuously,” the score says, at a forte.The group followed “Pige” with a transcription of “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” a straightforward treatment with a touch of frostiness in trilled harmonics. That could have been a baked-in encore, but the Danish players returned with another arrangement: of “Der Doppelgänger,” the series’s namesake.They referred to it as “one of Schubert’s best songs.” I’d agree, and add that it’s also one of his most terrifying, which they teased out by building on its harmonic ambiguity for a tension almost as discomfiting as the thought of death itself. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      Tyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest Year

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookTyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest YearAn artist straddling jazz and classical styles had perhaps the most exciting fall in new music.Tyshawn Sorey, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, conducting his song sequence “Cycles of My Being” in a filmed presentation by Opera Philadelphia.Credit…Dominic M. MercierJan. 1, 2021“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes”: Tyshawn Sorey wrote the string quartet that bears that title in 2018. But the sentiment is so tailor-made for the past year that when the JACK Quartet announced it would stream a performance of the work in December, I briefly forgot and assumed it was a premiere, created for these tumultuous yet static times.I should have known better. Mr. Sorey already had enough on his plate without cooking up a new quartet. The final two months of 2020 alone brought the premieres of a pair of concerto-ish works, one for violin and one for cello, as well as a fresh iteration of “Autoschediasms,” his series of conducted ensemble improvisations, with Alarm Will Sound.Mr. Sorey leading a rehearsal for Alarm Will Sound’s virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” one of his series of conducted ensemble improvisations.Credit…via Alarm Will SoundThat wasn’t all that happened for him since November. Mills College, where Mr. Sorey is composer in residence, streamed his solo piano set. Opera Philadelphia filmed a stark black-and-white version of his song sequence “Cycles of My Being,” about Black masculinity and racial hatred. JACK did “Everything Changes” for the Library of Congress, alongside the violin solo “For Conrad Tao.” Da Camera, of Houston, put online a 2016 performance of “Perle Noire,” a tribute to Josephine Baker that Mr. Sorey arranged with the soprano Julia Bullock. His most recent album, “Unfiltered,” was released early in March, days before lockdown.He was the composer of the year.That’s both coincidental — some of this burst of work was planned long ago — and not. Mr. Sorey has been on everyone’s radar at least since winning a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017, but the shock to the performing arts since late winter brought him suddenly to the fore as an artist at the nexus of the music industry’s artistic and social concerns.Undefinable, he is appealing to almost everyone. He works at the blurry and productive boundary of improvised (“jazz”) and notated (“classical”) music, a composer who is also a performer. He is valuable to ensembles and institutions because of his versatility — he can do somber solos as well as large-scale vocal works. And he is Black, at a time when those ensembles and institutions are desperate to belatedly address the racial representation in their programming.From left: Mr. Sorey, the soprano Julia Bullock and the flutist Alice Teyssier in Da Camera’s presentation of “Perle Noire,” inspired by Josephine Baker’s life and work.Credit…Ben DoyleHe’s in such demand, and has had so much success, that the trolls have come for him, dragging him on Facebook for the over-the-topness of the biography on his website. (Admittedly, it is a bit adjective-heavy: “celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery,” etc.)The style for which he has been best known since his 2007 album “That/Not,” his debut release as a bandleader, owes much to the composer Morton Feldman (1926-87): spare, spacious, glacially paced, often quiet yet often ominous, focusing the listener purely on the music’s unfolding. Mr. Sorey has called this vision that of an “imaginary landscape where pretty much nothing exists.”There is a direct line connecting “Permutations for Solo Piano,” a 43-minute study in serene resonance on that 2007 album, and the first of the two improvised solos in his recent Mills recital, filmed on an upright piano at his home. Even the far briefer second solo, more frenetic and bright, seems at the end to want to settle back into gloomy shadows.“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes,” a hovering, lightly dissonant 27-minute gauze, is in this vein, as is the new work for violin and orchestra, “For Marcos Balter,” premiered on Nov. 7 by Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Sorey insists in a program note that this is a “non-certo,” without a traditional concerto’s overt virtuosity, contrasting tempos or vivid interplay between soloist and ensemble.Xian Zhang conducting the violinist Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in Mr. Sorey’s “For Marcos Balter.”Credit…Sarah Smarch“For Marcos Balter” is even-keeled, steadily slow, a commune of players rather than a metaphorical give-and-take between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s deliberate long tones, like cautious exhalations, are met with spectral effects on the marimba. Quiet piano chords amplify quiet string chords. At the end, a timpani roll is muted to sound almost gonglike, with Ms. Koh’s violin a coppery tremble above it.It is pristine and elegant, but I prefer Mr. Sorey’s new cello-and-orchestra piece, “For Roscoe Mitchell,” premiered on Nov. 19 by Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony. There is more tension here between discreet, uneasy minimalism and an impulse toward lushness, fullness — more tension between the soloist receding and speaking his mind.The piece is less pristine than “For Marcos Balter,” and more restless. The ensemble backdrop is crystalline, misty sighs, while the solo cello line expands into melancholy arias without words; sometimes the tone is passionate, dark-hued nocturne, sometimes ethereal lullaby. “For Roscoe Mitchell” feels like a composer challenging himself while expressing himself confidently — testing the balance of introversion and extroversion, privacy and exposure.The cellist Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony perform the premiere of “For Roscoe Mitchell.”Credit…James Holt/Seattle SymphonyBut it’s not right to make it seem like an outlier in this respect; Mr. Sorey’s music has never been solely Feldmanian stillness. In Alarm Will Sound’s inspiringly well executed virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” Mr. Sorey conducted 17 players in five states over video chat, calm at his desk as he wrote symbols on cards and held them up to the camera, an obscure silent language that resulted in a low buzz of noise, varying in texture, and then, excitingly, a spacey, oozy section marked by keening bassoon tones.And he isn’t afraid of pushing into a kind of Neo-Romantic vibe. “Cycles of My Being,” featuring the tenor Lawrence Brownlee and texts by the poet Terrance Hayes, nods to the ardently declarative mid-20th-century American art songs of Samuel Barber and Lee Hoiby, just as “Perle Noire” features, near the end, a sweetly mournful instrumental hymn out of Copland.“Cycles,” which felt turgid when I heard it in a voice-and-piano version three years ago, bloomed in Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of the original instrumentation, which adds a couple of energizing strings and a wailing clarinet. And after a year of protests, what seemed in 2018 like stiffness — in both texts and music — now seems more implacable strength. (Opera Philadelphia presents yet another Sorey premiere, “Save the Boys,” with the countertenor John Holiday, on Feb. 12.)The cellist Khari Joyner playing in “Cycles of My Being.”Credit…Dominic M. MercierThe violinist Randall Goosby.Credit…Dominic M. Mercier“Perle Noire” still strikes me as the best of Sorey. Turning Josephine Baker’s lively numbers into unresolved meditations, here is both suave, jazzy swing and glacial expanse, an exploration of race and identity that is ultimately undecided — a mood of endless disappointment and endless wishing. (“My father, how long,” Ms. Bullock intones again and again near the end.)In works this strong, the extravagant praise for which some have ribbed Mr. Sorey on social media — that biography, for one, or the JACK Quartet lauding “the knife’s-edge precision of Sorey’s chess-master mind” — feels justified. And, anyway, isn’t it a relief to talk about a 40-year-old composer with the immoderate enthusiasm we generally reserve for the pillars of the classical canon?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More