Visitors often bring home tales of their time in Maine. But sometimes they also tell a few stories about their own home turf while they’re here.
The boundary-pushing JACK Quartet (an acronym for the first names of the founding members) brought some “New York Stories” to the Bowdoin International Music Festival on Sunday afternoon. Music by composers in one way or another connected to the Big Apple filled Studzinsky Recital Hall on the Bowdoin College campus with new and recent sounds, pulling at, bending and stretching the limits of the traditional string quartet into new directions.
The concert was part of the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music, a long-established set of concerts embedded within the larger festival.
The black-clad quartet, featuring Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman on violins, John Pickford Richards on viola, and Jay Campbell on cello, brought a serious attitude to music that had its moments of intense drama that were, however, sometimes broken up by lighter-hearted flourishes.
In brief opening remarks, Wulliman noted that a sense of longing and use of a cyclical manner of expression tied the five works together. There were the plinks and plunks, shrieks and yips often associated with contemporary chamber music. But there were also times when a subtle sense of momentum was quietly established.
The JACK Quartet performed Sunday at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. Photo courtesy of Bowdoin International Music Festival
Morton Feldman’s “Structures,” from 1951, the oldest piece in the program and the only one by a composer no longer with us, employed the silence around its musical ideas to build toward a lyrical transcendence. In its few minutes of performance, the work set a high standard for what followed by way of its cultivated use of restraint.
Caleb Burhans’ “Contritus” stretched the limits of repetition in a somber piece that felt trans-cultural through its rhythmic variations. A lovely, lyrical sense of a hard-won forgiveness confirmed the work’s intent by the close.
A performance of the “String Quartet No. 5” by Philip Glass proved the work both “typical” to the Glass oeuvre in its repetitions while also containing some lovely lyrical passages among its striking flourishes, hornet’s nests of high notes, and a relentless sense of forward momentum.
“Entr’acte,” a compact piece by Caroline Shaw, one of the hottest composers in contemporary music, proved both allusive in gathering references high and low, rendering the quartet a sort of classical string band at one point, and compellingly elusive in its overall frame of vision. The strumming cello work of Campbell particularly stood out.
The 90-minute concert concluded with a performance of John Zorn’s “The Remedy of Fortune,” a work that matches the sounds of medieval music with the abrupt transitions, trademark yelps, and piercing high harmonies of Zorn at his most expressive.
In a way, it could be said that this work, despite its recent vintage, sounded the most stylistically dated in a program that rewarded close listening through ears open to the immense talents of the JACK Quartet engaged in music that told lots of stories.
Steve Feeney is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.
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