Contemporary Voices

Albumbeschreibung

The Pulitzer Prize has not always been a reliable predictor of music that will find ongoing performances, but perhaps its record is improving: the Pacifica Quartet release Contemporary Voices includes music by three Pulitzer winners, and only one, Shulamit Ran's String Quartet No. 3 ("Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory"), is receiving its world premiere here. It's a fair bet that this work will be receiving other performances down the road: it's gripping. The work deploys the supposedly abstract string quartet medium in an intense and grim subjective narrative. It depicts the experiences of the painter Felix Nussbaum, who died at Auschwitz in 1994. The work begins calmly and moves through phases of terror, memory, and transcendent tragedy, all cohering as the experience of a single individual. The Pacifica is aided by impressive engineering from the Cedille label, working at a University of Chicago Performing Arts Center space. The instruments represent not the dialogue of the classic string quartet but the appearance of new threats, and the sound achieves impressive spatial separation. The other two works were recorded elsewhere, and the sound is not quite as striking but is certainly adequate. The three movements of Jennifer Higdon's Voices develop from configurations signaled by the movement titles; the second movement, "Soft Enclacing," is both intricate and seductive. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Quintet for alto saxophone and string quartet is the oldest of the three works, appearing in 1999. It sets not only the saxophone against the quartet but jazz-flavored passages against those without that influence, not always corresponding to the presence or absence of the saxophone. This can be recommended to anyone interested in contemporary chamber music.
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