What Remains

Album review

One might reasonably ask what is added to the music of Pérotin, Machaut, and Gesualdo by playing them on a string quartet. The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam itself even leaves the question open when it wonders what modern just intonation means when applied to the Notre Dame organum of Pérotin. Looked at another way, however, the minimalist and post-minimalist works at the core of the program here, by Steve Reich and Joey Roukens, also took the string quartet into new realms. Reich's Different Trains used the medium as a canvas for an entirely new way of hearing the relationship between speech and music in this Holocaust memorial work. The string quartet becomes not the learned conversation in the classic metaphor but a medium in which music can be stripped down to its essence. The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam is aiming not at a pastiche of contrasting works here but at a unified program in which the quartet medium is used to bring to life ways of music-making outside those of the Classic and Romantic eras, as a device for exploring music that seems elemental. It is splendidly recorded in a Netherlands radio studio, and the whole thing is thought-provoking enough to have landed the album on classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2023.

© James Manheim /TiVo