By Roger Emanuels

PRESENTED BY the Santa Cruz Chamber Players, the Del Sol String Quartet offered a program tailored for Santa Cruz audiences accustomed to hearing cutting-edge works. All the composers represented on the program either have lived in Santa Cruz or have performed here with the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. And a world premiere by local resident Josef Sekon added a bit of expectation to the concert at Peace United Church in Santa Cruz on Sunday afternoon.

Founded in 1992, the Quartet is based in San Francisco and performs internationally. Much of their repertoire was written for them, and they have made several recordings of music composed within the past few decades. They performed a concert at the Cabrillo Festival in 2012 in a program that included some works heard on this outing.

The Del Sol is unique in that the violinists and the violist prefer to stand when they perform, breaking a 250-year-old tradition of a seated string quartet. This surely gives them more freedom to interact. Another tradition broken is that the two violinists trade off on the first and second violin parts. Traditionally a first violinist always plays the demanding upper register parts in the symphony and string quartet, while the second violinist is branded for life in the lower register with none of the melodic glory. But in contemporary music the parts are not bound to their traditional roles.

Opening the program was Fast Blue Village 2 (2007) by Elena Kats-Chernin, born in 1957 in Uzbekistan. The Del Sol had played this at their Cabrillo Festival appearance in 2012. It’s an energetic concert opener, good for getting the audience prepared for a concert of contemporary chamber music. Cabrillo Festival-goers are familiar with the music of Kats-Chernin, who has been a festival composer-in-residence three times since 2010. A very attractive rhythmic groove propels this music forward.

Lou Harrison’s String Quartet Set was the most classical work on the program, and the only music from the past century. It was composed while Lou was living in the hills of Aptos in 1978-79. The Kronos Quartet was first to record the work in 1981, and the Del Sol recorded it in 2013, after having performed it at the 2012 Cabrillo Festival. For those of us who have listened to Lou’s music at the Cabrillo and at New Music Works over many decades, it was a joy to see these younger musicians embrace Harrison’s spirit and sound-world.

Lou’s work is a delight to hear, as it introduces the medieval scales and rhythms that he was comfortable with. As in much of his music, there is an abundance of melody and rhythm with little regard to harmony. He draws from a wide variety of sources including a 12th century song, a medieval peasant dance, a French Baroque Rondeaux, and a Turkish rhythmic mode. The peasant dance, or Estampie, was a favorite of Lou’s that he used in many works, with a sustained drone, while the cellist becomes a percussionist with tapping the body of the cello and using a mallet on the strings.

The audience was eager to hear the world premiere of Josef Sekon’s Adendo, a one-movement work that explores just about every string technique available, creating colorful and vibrant sounds. There is a lot of plucking and sliding on the strings (what musicians call pizzicato and glissando). At times the tone clusters shimmer with harmonics and tremolo, sounding like a musical representation of clusters of butterflies. Sekon, on the music faculty at Cabrillo College, has created a high-energy piece that makes good use of the string quartet and all its resources. One can hope that the work will receive more exposure.

Lembit Beecher grew up in Santa Cruz in the 1980s and ‘90s and is an active performer and composer on the East Coast. His These Memories May Be True is a musical response to the stories of his grandmother who escaped from Estonia during World War II. An earlier work, a one-act opera based on the same stories, was premiered just last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Beecher’s approach is calm. Textures tend to be light, giving the impression that the composer is reluctant to use too many notes. The four movements have titles representing the grandmother’s stories. The first movement has a quiet and wistful mood, the second movement rhythmically engaged throughout. At times the musicians seem to be playing completely different gestures. The following movement is very sparse, with effective use of silence, proving that some musical statements can be accomplished with fewer means. The work’s finale creates beautiful moments of warm, sustained sound.

Huang Ruo was born in China in 1976 and now lives in the United States. His Shattered Steps had a world premiere at the 2012 Cabrillo Music Festival. He composed Calligraffiti for string quartet in 2009, the title being a fusion of the words “calligraphy” and “graffiti,” two images that reflect the composer’s experiences in China and in New York. Ruo draws on Chinese elements such as short slides between notes. Long, sustained tones in clusters give way to more fragmented statements. Even microtones are used, best described as notes between the tones of western scales. The work was by far the most challenging music on the program for the audience.

To cleanse the ear with an encore, the Quartet offered a movement from Quartet No. 14 by the late Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, leaving the audience with warm and lyrical string tones.

The Del Sol excels with convincing performances. They are comfortable with each other and with the thorniest of scores. Their intonation is superb, allowing their sound to resonate. Most remarkable is how the players are very aware of balance, so that the listener can follow the action more easily. With new music, this is what makes it work in performance.

By Scott MacClelland

IN ITS FOURTH APPEARANCE for Chamber Music Monterey Bay, the Miró Quartet served up a fabulous feast to a hungry audience on Friday. The Miró began with one of the rare Haydn quartets in a minor key, the Opus 76, No. 2, nicknamed “Fifths” because of the way it begins. They ended the program with Schubert’s sprawling last quartet, in G Major, D 887. In between they gave the world premiere of a major new work, Five, by Texas-born Christopher Theofanidis, who was on hand for the event.

The four-movement Haydn quartet, in D Minor, has a decidedly rustic character, especially in the last two movements. The first of those, Minuetto, offers none of the genteel grace typical of the composer’s many other minuets in both chamber music and symphonies, which often convey a courtly, powdered-wig “Age of Enlightenment” character. (Think of the American founding fathers partying.) More often than not Haydn would reserve the “B” section of his minuets and scherzos for his rural, unbuttoned dances. In this case, the whole piece was countrified. That continued through the finale, whose momentum was interrupted by several pauses for air (Luftpausen, in German.) The playing was slick, smooth and precise.

Schubert’s G Major quartet is his most ambitious, on a scale with the C Major symphony and the C Major quintet, but not as popular as the “Death and the Maiden” D Minor quartet that just preceded it and which takes about 12 minutes less performance time. There is another notable difference between them. The D Minor still retains some of the composer’s youthful, cocky exuberance, while the G Major, like the two C Major pieces mentioned above, is the work of a young man staring down death with a slew of masterpieces. Program annotator Kai Christiansen wrote at length about the pervasive contrasts of light and dark, of major and minor, and the emotional intensity it contains, relieved only by the Mendelssohnian scherzo. I don’t remember when this work was last played in Carmel so it was a treat of “heavenly length” as Schumann famously described Schubert’s C Major symphony. The performance took nearly 50 minutes—like the symphony and the C Major quintet—and traced a monumental journey. All these great works, plus more, and most explicitly the last song cycle, Winterreise, are journeys. Schubert knew his end was nigh. Thanks to Miró’s heroic performance, I’m going to listen to the KUSP broadcast on Friday evening, May 15.

CMMB’s Arc of Life commission series was inspired by the video art of Bill Viola, in particular his Going Forth By Day (from which a grab is displayed above.) On a family vacation he nearly drowned in a mountain lake. He later described it as “the most beautiful world I’ve ever seen in my life,” “without fear,” and “peaceful.” His work picks up from that experience and deals with birth, life, death, human consciousness and ancient mystical traditions. (In 2004 he collaborated with Peter Sellars and Esa Pekka Salonen to stage a new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which premiered in Paris the following year and, the year after, his video for it was displayed in London as LOVE/DEATH The Tristan Project.)

Going Forth By Day laid the specific groundwork for Theofanidis’ Five, to wit, the five movements of Viola’s video: Fire Birth, The Path, The Deluge, The Voyage and First Light. (A short summary video of the piece was screened, revealing how much of Viola’s work involves water.) The movements ranged from five minutes to seven minutes, for a total time of 29 minutes. The longest was the first, with a wide range of effects, including tremolos and glissandos, that started with a lot of scrubbing before a motto theme emerged that would recur elsewhere in the work. The Path followed a walking pace while the music appeared in fragments often over a drone. The Deluge was pretty hysterical. (Its visual image showed a growing cascade of water washing people down stairs from inside a two-story building until, now empty, torrents of water gushed from the upstairs windows as well.) The Voyage played out in brief episodes while its ending would reappear as the beginning of First Light, whose forward motion was full of hesitations and gestures that finally ended in pianissimo.

Theofanidis deployed the instruments in different ways, sometimes with one leader and the others together as a group. Drones would accompany duets, as between violin and viola. There was little repetition of material but enough to disclose the composer’s formal devices and, more important, a consistent ‘sound world’ or, put another way, his distinctive ‘voice.’ This is an important and challenging work that got an excellent performance; I can’t imagine that Miró isn’t about to go into a studio to record it.

A moment of levity occurred when, in the first movement, the viola popped a string and its player, John Largess, had to leave the stage. Cellist Joshua Gindele stood and announced “It’s story time,” using the brief interruption to amuse the audience with an anecdote that occurred in the quartet’s early years at a chamber music competition at Banff. Once reassembled, the quartet played the complete work from the top.