(++++) FOURSOMES

Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 6; Fanny Mendelssohn: String Quartet; Juri Seo: river at the end of the mind. Esmé Quartet (Wonhee Bae and Yuna Ha, violins; Dimitri Murrath, viola; Yeeun Heo, cello). Alpha. $20.99. 

Music for Trombone Quartet by Jorge Variego, Eve Beglarian, Brooks Frederickson, Cole Bartels, and Alec Love. Beltline Bones (Cole Bartels, Justin Coyne, and Zach Bethel, tenor trombones; Adam Nissenbaum, bass trombone). New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

     The development of the string quartet is one of many things that the music world owes to the perennial innovator Haydn, who created the scherzo movement along the way. And even while Haydn was producing his 68 quartets, other composers were expanding the emotional compass of the form and experimenting with ways to increase its expressivity. Mendelssohn, who was born the year Haydn died, created six numbered quartets plus an early one in E-flat – the key in which his beloved older sister, Fanny, wrote her only quartet. The ties between Felix and Fanny were exceptionally deep and continue to be thoroughly explored biographically – and their musical ties were profound as well. The Esmé Quartet tries to emphasize both the siblings’ personal and musical relationships through a new Alpha recording, and if the conception is a bit forced – made more so by the inclusion of a new work by Juri Seo (born 1981) and a CD given the title Nui, a Korean word for “sister” – the actual musical performances are thoroughly convincing and make a fine case for all three pieces on the disc. Felix Mendelssohn’s sixth quartet, in F minor, is a great yawp of despair responding to Fanny’s death from a stroke in May 1847. The outer movements, in particular, are a blend of beauty and anguish unmatched anywhere else in Felix’s music, and the quartet is his final completed work – presaging (at least in retrospect) his own death only five months after Fanny’s. Again and again the quartet strives for the lyricism that seemed to flow so effortlessly from Felix at other times, and again and again its flow gives way to somber exclamations of pain. The many tremolos of the first movement have a feeling of shivering about them, and the second movement’s syncopations have a clocklike sense as if indicating the inexorable passage of time (toward death; again, at least retrospectively). What the Esmé Quartet does so well with this music is to allow it to flow, even overflow, emotionally, while not pushing it even further than it already goes: the performers retain a sense of control of the flow and design, no mean feat in a work in which the very structure of classical form, and of the string quartet in particular, seems to disintegrate. The players allow the lovely third movement to come across as the quartet’s only attempt at calm, or at least resignation, before plunging back into the deep darkness of the finale, a movement so much without consolation that Mendelssohn, a master of thematic design, here comes up only with fragmentary material that never fully develops into any theme at all. It is very difficult to couple this strong and strange quartet with anything else – it is in fact barely perceptible as “Mendelssohnian” – so mixing it with Fanny’s 1834 quartet is certainly as good a pairing as any. Fanny’s work – heavily influenced by Felix’s approach at the time and incorporating many suggestions that he made to her to overcome her reluctance to write for strings – actually has particular interest of its own: its first movement is marked Adagio ma non troppo and has the sense of a poignant, rather melancholic fantasia. It is in no way anticipatory of Felix’s No. 6, but, in the context of a recording, it does show elements of sensitivity and emotional depth that complement Felix’s work reasonably well. Indeed, Fanny’s quartet is unusually reflective: in addition to its thoughtful first movement, it has a third-movement Romanze filled with a sense of resignation. The two more-pensive movements mix rather uneasily with a brightly skittering second movement, which sounds a great deal like something by Felix, and a rather prosaic finale that changes the entire mostly thoughtful mood of the earlier movements into a conventional-sounding contrast and wrapup. A bit more ebullience and sense of joy would fit this movement better than the forthright approach of the Esmé Quartet, which only underlines the straightforwardness of the movement itself. However, the darker elements of Fanny’s quartet come through well enough to make the overall performance a worthy one despite the somewhat disappointing handling of the finale. Fanny’s quartet is placed first on the disc and is separated from Felix’s by the Seo work, river at the end of time (titled without capitals in a common contemporary-composer affectation). This is a mostly slow-moving piece, rooted in a Korean folk song. More pretty than profound, it has some nice instrumental touches (with especially sensitive use of pizzicato) but emotionally is surface-level throughout. Its louder and speedier central section, which provides some respite from its otherwise monochromatic mood, soon subsides toward an inevitable quiet conclusion that evaporates rather than concludes. Placing this piece with the two Mendelssohns’ is more a matter of the performers’ social commitment – and their interest in recording works they commission – than one involving musically solid decision-making. But if the Seo work adds little to the disc, it takes nothing away from it, and the sensitive playing of the Esmé Quartet’s members serves Seo as well as it serves Fanny and Felix. 

     Haydn could scarcely have anticipated the future developments accorded to the string quartet – much less the creation of four-instrument ensembles not involving strings at all. Contemporary predilections for aural experimentation have led to a proliferation of unusual instrumental groupings in the 21^st century, one such being the four-trombone ensemble called Beltline Bones (a suitably avant-gardish name) created in 2021. In a new recording, the group highlights some works it has commissioned – commissions obviating the necessity of transcribing non-trombone music for a trombone quartet, an awkward concept at best that may well put fanciers of the Hoffnung Festival concerts in mind of the presentation there of an arrangement of a Chopin mazurka for four tubas. The five composers whose works appear on a New Focus Recordings release – one of them being Beltline Bones leader Cole Bartels – all have trombones and modern electroacoustics in mind in their pieces. Two of the six works on the CD are by Eve Beglarian. Wet Psalm is actually a primarily vocal piece, in which Bible readings are interrupted/accentuated (depending on your viewpoint) by choral shouts and zither-like sounds mingle with those of the violin (played by Matheus Garcia Souz) and the trombones. Pump Music mixes field recordings of pumps and flowing water with instrumental interjections and underlinings. Jorge Variego’s Ocho, mostly chordal, incorporates vocal elements and, eventually, a kind of vocalise. Brooks Frederickson’s I was thinking about the buffalo is the exception on this disc to the “no arrangements of string quartet music” approach: it was originally written for strings and is here arranged by Bartels for trombones. Intended to reflect the world of Star Trek, it will have a meaningful connection only for fans of that series who understand that the piece’s title relates to the series’ finale. Alec Love’s Technological Eclipse also has a fantasy/SF tie-in, or sounds as if it does, incorporating the sorts of instrumental and electronic effects frequently used in genre productions into a soundworld also permeated by voices – computer-generated ones. Midway through the CD, in the midst of all these works appears Bartels’ own, Stella eats her breakfast, at three minutes the shortest piece on a disc that itself is quite short (41 minutes). Based on the sound effects in this work, Stella appears to be a cat, and the trombones comment rather entertainingly on her feeding time and, eventually, her satisfied postprandial nap. The humor of Bartels’ work is noticeably absent in the other music on this (+++) CD, which is a shame, since trombones’ ability to produce a multiplicity of moods (from the sacred to the outright funny) is an element of their communicative potential. This disc is clearly intended only for audiences enamored of typical contemporary mixings of acoustic instruments with electronic alterations (which are not necessarily enhancements, although often described with that word). It is less an exploration of quartet capabilities than a chance to hear how the four-instrument format can be adapted to various up-to-date if no longer unusual compositional methods and the sounds they produce.