Samuel Barber: String Quartet No. 1; Wynton Marsalis: At the Octoroon Balls; John Williams: With Malice Toward None; Erich Wolfgang Korngold: String Quartet No. 3. Calidore String Quartet (Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violins; Jeremy Berry, viola; Estelle Choi, cello). Signum Classics. $19.99.
Ken Ueno: Wavelengths; …a.m…; I am the uncle who sees past lives; Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off. New Focus Recordings. $18.99.
Just what it means to be an American is a topic that has been debated now for 250-plus years; and if the debate seems unusually strident nowadays, that is only because the relatively young nation has a comparatively short memory. In musical circles, the semiquincentennial of the United States happens to coincide with the increasing frequency of idiosyncratic concert and recorded programming, wherein performers mix and match pieces of music based on their own highly personal notions of what gives a presentation coherence and (one hopes) meaning for an audience. When a program is convincingly assembled and well-performed, it can be effective even when, objectively speaking, it is something of a mismatch, whereas when the works do not really relate well to each other, the grouping really reaches out only to listeners who happen to share the performers’ specific notion of appropriateness of the combination. In the case of the new Signum Classics release by the Calidore Quartet, the intriguing combination of string quartets by Barber and Korngold and the excellence of the playing carry the weight of a CD that otherwise does not quite hang together well enough to live up to its title of “American Tapestry.” Still, this is certainly a well-woven and thoughtful program. Samuel Barber’s String Quartet No. 1 is his one completed work in the form: he made only a few sketches for a second. The piece is best-known for Barber’s orchestral arrangement of its middle movement as the very popular Adagio for Strings. Contextualized in its original form and position, the movement proves to be a strong contrast with the other two: the first movement is expansive and much more “modern” in musical language (for the 1930s), while the third is very short and emphatically conclusive. The work as a whole mixes nostalgic, lyrical elements with overtly up-to-date ones for its time period; the extent to which that reflects something particularly “American” is, however, a matter of opinion. In any case, Barber’s quartet complements Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s String Quartet No. 3, a work from the mid-1940s, in interesting ways. Korngold also melds lyrical and strident elements, but his overall language is less tonal, more acerbic, more strongly chromatic than Barber’s – despite Korngold’s use in the third of the work’s four movements of the love theme from one of his film scores, for The Sea Wolf (1941). An attractively variegated work whose individual elements sound largely disconnected from each other, Korngold’s quartet works its way toward an upbeat and tonal conclusion that, thanks to the Calidore Quartet’s attentiveness to the music’s many moods, comes across to very fine effect. The Korngold and Barber quartets, taken together, seem to point to an America that is disjointed, multifaceted and more than a touch uncertain about itself and its place in the world – which, come to think of it, is a pretty good conclusion. The other two pieces on this CD are more overtly illustrative of specifics than are those by Barber and Korngold. The Calidore Quartet plays the three inner movements from Wynton Marsalis’ seven-movement At the Octoroon Balls (whose title refers to Creole social/romantic rituals). Jazz (which is a strongly American form) mixes here with hymnlike and songful material, and there is considerable well-conceived scene-painting throughout – notably in Hellbound Highball, a movement depicting a Hades-bound train whose intermittent stops and starts require intricate collaborative playing that the performers manage with apparent ease. The Marsalis material is fascinating on its own – the complete suite would likely be even more so – but its particular form of impressionistic writing does not fit especially well with the works by Barber and Korngold. Finally – although not placed last on the CD, which would have been a better decision – the Calidore Quartet offers the short, warm and heartfelt With Malice Toward None by John Williams. This is the Lincoln theme that Williams wrote for Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film about one of the few figures in American history whose positive reputation seems immune to rethinking and reconsideration. Placing this piece at the disc’s end would have given the whole CD an ultimately more-hopeful feeling than it receives by having the Korngold quartet as its final piece, but perhaps that is part of the point the Calidore Quartet wants to make here: that America does possess warmth and goodness (which it all too often martyrs), but that the meaning and meaningfulness of the nation are far from sunnily optimistic. Ultimately, what works and does not work for individual listeners in this compilation will be a matter of personal taste, but for any audience, the highly impressive individual and ensemble playing of the performers will stand out and will invite contemplation of the extent to which the works chosen for this disc do or do not encapsulate the American experience.
American musical life in the 21st century is no less variegated than that of the 20th, when all the works performed by the Calidore Quartet except the one by Williams were written. But contemporary American composers such as Ken Ueno (born 1970) very often create music using techniques that distance themselves from any specific geographical location and focus on sound production that is as universal as it is off-putting to those more interested in traditional forms and/or instruments. A (+++) New Focus Recordings CD of four Ueno works, performed by the composer and members of a group called The Up:Strike (sic) Project, treads the boundary between music and noise in a way that will be familiar to anyone acquainted with today’s compositional techniques and the instrumentation used to bring conceptualizations into auditory reality. Wavelengths (2019) is for a solo vibraphone on which speakers have been placed to emit sine tones that expand the notes being played. It is one of those extension-of-technique works that so many modern composers favor in looking for ways to expand instrumental capabilities beyond those normally heard. It is followed on the CD by …a.m… (sic, period and ellipses included), a 2002 piece for percussion quartet that opens with white noise (a sound often heard in avant-garde material), moves into individual instrumental strikes, then eventually leads to cacophony until it ends with the sounds of tuned metal pipes. I am the uncle who sees past lives (2024) uses Ueno’s own vocals – extended, amplified and otherwise pulled and pushed beyond what the human “throat instrument” can produce on its own – along with electronics that produce the vague feeling of a forest or jungle setting. And Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off, a 2023 work that is another percussion-quartet piece, intermingles four vibraphones in wholly nonthematic material that swells and subsides, joins and separates in ways that intermittently unite the performers and maintain them in thoroughly disconnected trajectories. All four of these works are quite extended as sound-pattern-based pieces go – ranging in length from more than 12 minutes to more than 20 – and all are aurally immersive for listeners inclined to desire the sound worlds that Ueno creates and explores. This Ueno-focused recording is emphatically not a CD for a general audience, but it is every bit as American in its way and its orientation as is the disc in which the Calidore Quartet uses its acoustic instruments to bring forth the sonic environments created and explored by Barber, Korngold, Marsalis and Williams.
