Brentano Quartet, San Francisco Performances

Anyone who’s followed this quirky (and preposterously skilled) ensemble for any time at all knows that it’s ill-inclined to sit still, and that when it does move, it’s nearly always in a startling direction. The quartet’s most recent project is called Fragments, and the idea is that half a dozen living composers are presented with unfinished works of earlier composers, to respond to as they will. (See the video here, wherein composers Bruce Adolphe, Vijay Iyer, and Charles Wuorinen talk about their contributions to the project.)

You can deal with incomplete pieces in only a few ways — you don’t play them at all (or play only and exactly what’s actually in the manuscript); or you complete them in the best approximation of the composer’s style you can muster; or you take the fragment as a jumping-off point and write something the originating composer would never have dreamt of. The last is the most fruitful, as well as the most fun. (Can’t imagine “Wuorinen” and “fun” in the same concert hall? Go on, I double-dare you.)