Philip Glass Quartet to Be Performed at AIDS Memorial as Tribute to Brian Buczak
Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, written after the death of the artist Brian Buczak, will be performed at the New York City AIDS Memorial.The night Brian Buczak died, fireworks lit up the sky.It was July 4, 1987, and his bed at New York University’s hospital on the East River overlooked the holiday celebrations. Buczak’s partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, a prolific painter of clouds, was struck by the beauty of what he saw outside the window: bursts of color, brightening a dark expanse.Buczak was just 32, but he had already made more than 400 paintings, founded a small printing press for artists and settled down with Hendricks, the love of his life, with whom he had restored a Federal-style house on Greenwich Street. But all that was cut off when Buczak, like many thousands of New Yorkers before and since, died of complications from AIDS.As Hendricks grieved, he turned to a friend, the composer Philip Glass, to write a tribute to Buczak. The result was Glass’s Fourth String Quartet, nicknamed Buczak, which he has described as “a musical impression.” It premiered on the second anniversary of Buczak’s death at the Hauser Gallery; now it is returning with a free performance by the Mivos Quartet on Sunday at the New York City AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village.This weekend’s concert is the latest event in a resurgence of Buczak’s story and work. Last winter, there was a solo exhibition of his art, “Man Looks at the World,” at the Gordon Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects galleries, his first since 1989, the year Glass’s quartet premiered. Hendricks, who died in 2018, has a show opening on Friday at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.“It’s such a relief,” Bracken Hendricks, Hendricks’s son and something like a stepson to Buczak, said of the fresh attention on Buczak. “It feels really earned by Brian’s just really deep and thoughtful work. His creative output was well conceived and conceptualized, and beautifully realized, but it was also forged by the grief of knowing he was dying.”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
