JACK Quartet (4/29/18)

Christopher Otto, violin; Austin Wulliman, violin; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello

Mouthpiece XXII (2015) – Erin Gee
String Quartet No. 8 (2018) – Philip Glass
Darmstadt Kindergarten (2015) – Mark Applebaum
Richter Textures (2011) – Amy Williams

This concert, which was a lot shorter than the Beethoven string quartet marathon of the day before, was part of the Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert series. Since the neighborhood was Washington Heights, I was joined by a former colleague who lives in the area. I warned her ahead of time that the works would all be extremely contemporary, and that we could bail if we wanted to. She did some online exploring and had a pretty good understanding of what we were in for. As it turned out, we both enjoyed the concert more than we thought we would.

The piece by Erin Gee is a continuation of her Mouthpiece series. Here, the string quartet players had to incorporate whistling into the performance as well as playing their instruments at the same time. At ten minutes in length, it was interesting and enjoyable.

Philip Glass’ string quartet was co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Winnipeg New Music Festival and, if memory serves, was premiered by JACK at the hall. Not being a big fan of minimalism, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this piece. Yes, there were repeating phrases and motifs, but they didn’t seem as mind-numbing and Zen-like as other pieces by Glass that I’ve heard. Hmm, maybe my horizons are expanding.

Taken from an online description of Darmstadt Kindergarten written by the composer, the piece consists of a seventeen-measure “theme,” composed in two versions: instrumental and choreographic. Yep, these boys got quite the aerobic workout from this one. The instrumental theme is played by all four string players together and then, one by one, each instrument drops out and the player performs the choreographic theme, which is mostly silent but does include some percussive sounds. At the end, all four are performing choreographically, though the theme for each player is varied slightly. This was an amazing piece—I’ve literally never experienced anything like it. Bravo, JACK and bravo Mr. Applebaum!

Ms. Williams’ piece paled by comparison, after the shenanigans that came before it. It’s not a bad piece; it was, however, my least favorite on the program. The seven movements, played without pause, represent the layers of sound associated, in the composer’s mind, with seven different paintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter. It made sense, sort of.

A note about the quartet’s name: The original cellist of the group was Kevin McFarland (and one of the original violinists was Ari Streisfeld), so by using the first initial of the four first names, John, Ari, Christopher, and Kevin created JACK. Jay is a very capable cellist, but I guess they’re sticking with JACK (and Austin is no slouch either, but at least his name works better for the group's name).

ConcertMeister