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RECITAL REVIEW
March 21, 2004
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By David Bithell
It should seem that programming a concert of largely "classic" 20th-
century works for string quartet shouldn't be very unusual, but
Sunday's appearance of the FLUX Quartet at San Francisco State
University's McKenna Theater seemed, unfortunately, surprising —
unfortunate in that the Bay Area has been largely unable to support a
healthy ongoing relationship with the total breadth of contemporary
musical practices. An insistence on programming the
"under-represented" and "maverick" largely west-coast American
composers has led to these same composers becoming, locally,
"over-represented" and even "mainstream." While I personally enjoy
much of that music, there is a wider scope to contemporary music
including, for example, Europe. With rare and notable exceptions, the
music that makes up the bulk of an average 20th-century music textbook
has been given very little exposure here — at least over the past five
years.
This was, in part, what made the programming of the FLUX Quartet
special. While presenting a pair of American "mavericks" (Morton
Feldman's Structures and John Zorn's Cat o' Nine Tails), the program was balanced with two European "classics" (György Ligeti's String Quartet No. 2 and Giancinto Scelsi's String Quartet No. 5).
Based in New York, FLUX is a young quartet composed of Tom Chiu
(violin), Conrad Harris (violin), Max Mandel (viola), and Dave Eggar
(cello), who have begun to make a name for themselves as a new
generation of string quartet focusing on contemporary music. Not quite
as staunchly modernist as the Arditti Quartet, nor as staunchly
post-modernist as the Kronos Quartet, the FLUX Quartet seems to thrive
by playing good, underplayed music in America.
Ligeti's String Quartet No. 2, written in 1968, traverses in its five
movements many of the musical landscapes familiar to his musical
output. The FLUX quartet handled Ligeti's gestural development and
formal contrasts with a clear sense of drama and found an equal home in
the fierce and tranquil sections of the work. While some tuning
problems arose in the most exposed sections, their treatment of the
gentle harmonic oscillations of the last movement and the trading back
and forth of unisons in the second revealed an overall concern for
delicacy.
The gradually expanding texture found in Scelsi's String Quartet No. 5, with its drone-like centering on individual pitches, is provocative mainly through its sonic intensity. At times the performers let this intensity drop, as if the necessary central core had been forgotten, but were still able to maintain a technical clarity. Structures, Morton Feldman's early work for string quartet, was full of beautiful gem-like sounds. Structurally akin to many of John Cage's works from the late 1940's, the off-balance ostinati sounded surprisingly similar to Feldman's more-frequently performed later works. The FLUX Quartet has recently performed and recorded Feldman's huge six-hour String Quartet II, and continues to make this work a relevant 20th-century experiment. The most recent composition on the program was John Zorn's Cat o' Nine Tails from 1988. Formally a cartoon-like alternation of wildly divergent styles, the piece seemed, surprisingly, the most dated work. The post-modern attitude adopted, in which stylistic difference is meant to be inherently funny, had a cultural necessity in the 1980's and early 1990's that seems more trivial today. Sixteen years later, I know that "low-culture" can be "high-culture". This being said, there is still a good deal of energy and humor left in the piece. The FLUX Quartet performed this work with a lot of spirit, clearly making it the crowd-pleaser of the afternoon. At times the pauses between sections of the work could have been quicker to amplify the "channel-changing" effect of jumping between styles. In general the quartet ran into a couple of pitfalls. As performers, the group had a somewhat unbalanced physical presence. The players need more agreement on how much body movement is desired and, in the case of the Zorn composition, how much to show the humor physically. Additionally, the quartet had difficulty dealing with empty time. Most notably in the Feldman, the spaces between events were too often filled with page turning and readjusting rather than with the needed silent intensity that makes the music come to life.
(David Bithell is a composer/performer based in the East Bay whose
work explores the connections between music, theater, and language. He
is co-director of the sfSoundSeries.)
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FLUX Quartet