15-02-2013, 09:26 PM
The New York Times
February 14, 2013
A Fateful Day in 1963: A Composer's View
By STEVE SMITH
"My name is Franz Joseph Haydn, and I wrote the piece you just heard," the composer Steven Mackey brightly announced from the Zankel Hall stage during a concert by the Brentano String Quartet there on Tuesday evening.
Not half bad, as icebreakers go. New pieces by composers who are not quite household names can be cause for apprehension among some audience members. Mr. Mackey, who actually wrote the work that followed Haydn's Quartet in E flat (Op. 33, No. 2) Haydn's piece is nicknamed "Joke," appropriately enough instantly had wary listeners on his side.
Mr. Mackey, who turned 57 on Thursday, grew up immersed in rock music, and he has incorporated its alluring buzz into his best-known concert pieces, many of which include his primary ax, the electric guitar. Here, though, he drew upon a different facet of a media-steeped childhood memories of President John F. Kennedy's assassination for "One Red Rose," commissioned in part by Carnegie Hall and presented here in its premiere.
In his introductory comments Mr. Mackey, who grew up in California, said that he was sick and at home from school on that fateful November day in 1963, when news bulletins interrupted the morning cartoons. Soon after, he heard his mother weeping with a neighbor.
Fittingly, "One Red Rose" recalls a national tragedy through specific impressions, filtered through 50 years of subsequent insight and experience. The three-movement work, its title derived from a detail reported by a Secret Service agent who examined the presidential limousine, explores "the dialectic between the personal and the public," Mr. Mackey wrote in a program note.
"Five Short Studies" opens the piece with a frisson of harmonic unease, moving briskly through sensations of decorous rigor and anticipatory bustle. "Fugue and Fantasy" fuses coarse group outbursts, sharp pizzicato snaps and chugging odd-meter rhythms with slowly unfurling solo and duo lines, conjoining the frenzy of instant reaction with the frozen time of individual perception. The finale, "Anthem and Aria," similarly juxtaposes evocations of benumbed collective anguish and acutely felt private grief.
Heartfelt in effect and fascinating in detail, "One Red Rose" showed Mr. Mackey's expert grasp of the string quartet idiom: not only the timbres, textures and expressive effects of its component instruments, but also the genre's distinctive capacities for parity, transparency and discernible impact of disparate, simultaneous threads.
The Brentano players performed with their customary control and oversize passion, earning a rousing, sustained ovation for themselves and for Mr. Mackey. Their elegance and wit were on generous display in the opening Haydn work; the concert closed with a grandiloquent account of Beethoven's String Quartet in G (Op. 18, No. 2).
Adele
February 14, 2013
A Fateful Day in 1963: A Composer's View
By STEVE SMITH
"My name is Franz Joseph Haydn, and I wrote the piece you just heard," the composer Steven Mackey brightly announced from the Zankel Hall stage during a concert by the Brentano String Quartet there on Tuesday evening.
Not half bad, as icebreakers go. New pieces by composers who are not quite household names can be cause for apprehension among some audience members. Mr. Mackey, who actually wrote the work that followed Haydn's Quartet in E flat (Op. 33, No. 2) Haydn's piece is nicknamed "Joke," appropriately enough instantly had wary listeners on his side.
Mr. Mackey, who turned 57 on Thursday, grew up immersed in rock music, and he has incorporated its alluring buzz into his best-known concert pieces, many of which include his primary ax, the electric guitar. Here, though, he drew upon a different facet of a media-steeped childhood memories of President John F. Kennedy's assassination for "One Red Rose," commissioned in part by Carnegie Hall and presented here in its premiere.
In his introductory comments Mr. Mackey, who grew up in California, said that he was sick and at home from school on that fateful November day in 1963, when news bulletins interrupted the morning cartoons. Soon after, he heard his mother weeping with a neighbor.
Fittingly, "One Red Rose" recalls a national tragedy through specific impressions, filtered through 50 years of subsequent insight and experience. The three-movement work, its title derived from a detail reported by a Secret Service agent who examined the presidential limousine, explores "the dialectic between the personal and the public," Mr. Mackey wrote in a program note.
"Five Short Studies" opens the piece with a frisson of harmonic unease, moving briskly through sensations of decorous rigor and anticipatory bustle. "Fugue and Fantasy" fuses coarse group outbursts, sharp pizzicato snaps and chugging odd-meter rhythms with slowly unfurling solo and duo lines, conjoining the frenzy of instant reaction with the frozen time of individual perception. The finale, "Anthem and Aria," similarly juxtaposes evocations of benumbed collective anguish and acutely felt private grief.
Heartfelt in effect and fascinating in detail, "One Red Rose" showed Mr. Mackey's expert grasp of the string quartet idiom: not only the timbres, textures and expressive effects of its component instruments, but also the genre's distinctive capacities for parity, transparency and discernible impact of disparate, simultaneous threads.
The Brentano players performed with their customary control and oversize passion, earning a rousing, sustained ovation for themselves and for Mr. Mackey. Their elegance and wit were on generous display in the opening Haydn work; the concert closed with a grandiloquent account of Beethoven's String Quartet in G (Op. 18, No. 2).
Adele