Dozens of famous composers have borrowed or imitated folk tunes and pop music in their works, from Dvorak, Vaughan Williams and Kodaly to Stravinsky and Copland, not to mention Beethoven and Mozart (think “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”). Two of the works performed at Meany Hall Thursday night by the Corigliano Quartet follow in their footsteps.
Commissioned for the group by Chamber Music America, Dan Visconti’s Ballads and Broken Rhythms pays homage, the composer says, to Tin Pan Alley and American pop music of the 1920s and ’30s when great songs were being poured out in profusion.
Adam Silverman gives in to his love of Irish fiddle music, not to mention admiration for those who play it, in Corrie Q’s Jigs and Reels, his third string quartet.
The 12-year-old Corigliano Quartet has been making an excellent name for itself since its beginnings at Indiana University, and has devoted itself to performing and promoting contemporary music. This doesn’t mean stuff which takes hard work and an intellectual approach to appreciate: there is no spinach here, or at least there wasn’t Thursday.
Both Visconti’s and Silverman’s works were fun to hear with plenty of tuneful melodies in each, yet with sophisticated harmonies and rhythmic departures which lifted them out of the mundane to something with depth which will bear repeated listening.
Written this year and receiving its premiere this past March, Ballad and Broken Rhythms comprises seven short movements. Jazz, blues, pop and soul all are interwoven with classical techniques, including at times slurs and swoops in both pitch and volume, sometimes haunting, sometimes bright. The whole has a light, clean construction and it shouldn’t meet the one-performance fate of so many new works. This one has staying power.
So does Silverman’s 2005 Corrie Q’s Jigs and Reels. This is immediately appealing, with instant recognition of the Irish fiddling technique, familiar also in blue grass music. In three movements, jigs, waltzes and reels, Silverman conjures up the image of those dances and those fiddlers, but the harmonies become unexpected. The second movement particularly feels like an Irish love song, one of those narrrative ballads, bright and cheerful but also full of yearning.
The Corigliano Quartet got its name from its sudden, scrambling inception, when composer John Corigliano was to be at Indiana University for a special occasion, and the organizer asked student violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim if he had a quartet which could play Corigliano’s string quartet to honor the composer. Lim hadn’t, but promptly said “Yes,” found the players and with them prepared the very difficult quartet as though cramming for an exam. The result was a success and they began to work as a professional quartet after a comment from Corigliano that he thought the four players had that certain something and they should continue. The Quartet has since won prizes, recognition and plaudits for performances all over the country.
The performers are Lim, violinist Lina Bahn, violist Melia Watras and cellist Amy Sue Barston. Currently three of the group have connections to Seattle. Lim teaches at Cornish College of the Arts and Watras at the University of Washington, while Barston’s sister Elisa is principal second violin for the Seattle Symphony.
The group played that Corigliano Quartet—very new when they first played it, being written in 1995—as the final work on their Meany program. It was comissioned by The Cleveland Quartet for its farewell tour before the group disbanded, and there is a definite sense of nostalgia in it, even grieving at times. It’s in five movements with a classic overarching shape, the central movement being the heart, and the outer movements using mutes and even practice mutes, which give a thin, hardly audible sound, to begin and end the work. It’s a major piece, and the orchestral version won Corigliano a Pulitzer Prize.
There is a feeling of Picasso in music here, elements being distorted, slipped sideways or in unexpected colors, yet with the overall mastery holding it together.
The Quartet performed it with confidence and understanding, its architecture clear, the haunting moments of farewell subtly present.
Corigliano was right when he said the group had what it took to be a quartet. There is symmetry and synchronism in their playing; tone which can be harsh, rich, warm, light, feathery or firm according to need; thoughtful interpretation; and communication which keeps all the apparently wayward sections, like the Corigliano fugue movement, firmly in hand.
This was the final chamber music concert on the UW World Series this year, and a return by the Corigliano Quartet to Seattle will be welcome.
