MUSIC FOR LIVING: August 2009

 

Emerson String Quartet                                                                   
Intimate Letters
Deutsche Grammophon       

 

After thirty-plus years and countless recordings and performances, the Emerson String Quartet hardly has to prove it can have its way with Czech chamber music. Nevertheless, the group further lays claim to being masters of the idiom, especially the complex, Eastern Europe-meets-Western Europe tonalities of Leos Janácek, whose String Quartet No. 1 and 2 bookend Bohuslav Martinu’s Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola, together comprising the program on the foursome’s latest CD. Fans of the cult film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s work of the same name, will recognize the second String Quartet, and relive the dramatic passion Janácek—who based the quartet on his letters to his unrequited muse—built into the score, deftly rendered here by the Emersonians.

 

 

Phillip Johnston
Page of Madness
Asynchronous

I didn’t even realize until sitting down to write about Phillip Johnston’s latest music that the saxophonist/composer had written it as the soundtrack to Page of Madness, a 1926 Japanese silent film, so evocative is the score by itself. Working with his Transparent Quartet, including Joe Ruddick on piano and baritone saxophone, Mark Josefsberg on vibraphone, and David Hofstra on bass, Johnston creates a cinematic landscape using eclectic building blocks from jazz and experimental music, as well as classical and rock. While partly notated and partly improvised to synchronize with the film, the end result, detached from its impetus, stands on its own as a powerful and dynamic work, at times eerie and lyrical, at times irregular and brash, but always in the moment.

 

 

Kronos Quartet
Floodplain
Nonesuch

 

Partnering with musicians from around the world, Kronos Quartet continues to mine its global perspective in a program of a dozen compositions drawn from on areas based in the traditional floodplains of the title, where civilization began in ancient times and where the intermingling of different ethnicities and cultures has seen as much conflict as harmony. This setup makes for an innovative, if at times harsh, travelogue, taking listeners from the Nile to the Euphrates to the Ganges with a detour to war-torn Serbia in the form of a twenty-minute, multicultural suite by Aleksandra Vrebalov, who’s not yet hit age forty. The piece combines found sounds, including church bells, Muslim calls to prayer, and spoken word by Vrebalov’s grandmother, with Gypsy-flavored quartet passages eloquently recounting the narrative of this battle-scarred land in music. [AUGUST 2009]