Bringing Disparate Ethnic and Cultural Worlds Together
January 13, 2007
New York Times
As high-concept programs go, it would be hard to beat the one the Chiara String Quartet brought to Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday evening. Under the title Mestizaje: Harmony of Differences, the group offered works in which disparate musical, ethnic and cultural influences mingle (the meaning of the Spanish word in the title, at least as the quartet is using it). The programs two halves were listed as acts, with the stage bathed in red light during the performances and dark between them.
For all that, there were only four works on the program. But the musicians found an unusual way to stretch their resources: they used the six movements of Gabriela Lena Franks Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001) as a frame for the other pieces. The first two movements opened the concert; the third and fourth ended the first half; and the fifth and sixth closed the performance. In effect, the four works became six segments.
Ms. Franks score was composed for the Chiara players, who recently released a recording of it as a CD single on their own New Voice Singles label. Parts of the work are models of European classicism, with fleeting passages calling to mind Beethoven and Tchaikovsky quartets.
Yet South American folk themes are more prominent, and through much of the work, the ensemble s business is evoking Andean folk instruments, from panpipes to guitars. Pizzicato writing is plentiful and yields a tactile texture that, together with the works easygoing harmony and periodic bursts of energy, gives it an immediate appeal.
Enlisting Bartok for a program of boundary-crossing works may be too easy, but the Chiara was clearly unable to resist. Still, in the Quartet No. 2, themes built on moves from Hungarian and Romanian folk song are enveloped in the more intensely chromatic, emotionally charged harmonies of Bartoks more formal music.
Similar extremes, and a greater depth of anguish, drive Osvaldo Golijovs Yiddishbbuk (1992). And Zhou Longs Song of the Chin (1982) used techniques heard in both the Bartok and Frank works: Chinese folk melodies offset freely chromatic, pulse-free modernist passages, and the quartet, again playing pizzicato, sometimes imitated the chin, a zither.
The Chiara Quartet gave these works luminous performances, underlining the sweet-toned character of Ms. Frank's score and the mystery and exoticism of Mr. Zhou's work. But the best performances were searing accounts of the Bartok and Golijov pieces, for which the players produced a tone that ranged from glowing warmth to hard-edged acerbity, which each of these searing works demands.
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