WNMF 3: Attacca Quartet

Taking a decidedly brighter thematic turn, WNMF heads to Winnipeg’s sparkling new Desautels Concert Hall to present the scintillating string stylings of the Attacca Quartet.

The New York City-based ensemble has garnered numerous accolades since its foundation, including two Grammy awards for their collaborations with composer Caroline Shaw.

The playfully virtuosic program features two of Shaw’s works, alongside Gabriella Smith’s irreverent Carrot Revolution, Mingjia Chen’s cross-stylistic floatwalking, and the sizzling Dark Energy by Canadian master Kelly-Marie Murphy.

The evening culminates in the tour de force of string quartet writing LIFT by composer and Kronos Quartet cellist Paul Wiancko.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Caroline Shaw – Blueprint (2016)

The Aizuri Quartet’s name comes from “aizuri-e,” a style of Japanese woodblock printing that primarily uses a blue ink. In the 1820s, artists in Japan began to import a particular blue pigment known as “Prussian blue,” which was first synthesized by German paint producers in the early 18th century and later modified by others as an alternative to indigo. The story of aizuri-e is one of innovation, migration, transformation, craft, and beauty.

Blueprint, composed for the incredible Aizuri Quartet, takes its title from this beautiful blue woodblock printing tradition as well as from that familiar standard architectural representation of a proposed structure: the blueprint. This piece began its life as a harmonic reduction — a kind of floor plan — of Beethoven’s string quartet Op. 18 No. 6. As a violinist and violist, I have played this piece many times, in performance and in joyous late-night reading sessions with musician friends. (One such memorable session included Aizuri’s marvelous cellist, Karen Ouzounian.) Chamber music is ultimately about conversation without words. We talk to each other with our dynamics and articulations, and we try to give voice to the composers whose music has inspired us to gather in the same room and play music. Blueprint is also a conversation — with Beethoven, with Haydn (his teacher and the “father” of the string quartet), and with the joys and malinconia of his Op. 18 No. 6.

Kelly-Marie Murphy – Dark Energy (2007)

We live in a cosmologically interesting time. First, Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet reducing our solar system to 8 planets. Then, an ancient cosmic mystery came to light. Apparently, five billion years ago, there was a sudden expansion of the cosmos. The galaxies started moving away from one another at a faster pace, as if repelled by some kind of antigravity. Recently, a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope observed that billions of years before this antigravity sent the galaxies flying apart, it was already present in space and affecting the evolution of the cosmos. This antigravity force is known as dark energy.

The existence of dark energy was first postulated by Einstein in 1917 as a way to explain why the universe doesn’t collapse. In November 2006, the New York Times explained it this way:

“Because it is a property of empty space, the overall force of Einstein’s constant grows in proportion to the expanding universe until it overwhelms everything.”

Dark Energy was commissioned by the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the CBC as the imposed piece for 2007. In a single movement, the quartet opens softly and simply. It is melodic and displays many different colours using various techniques. It gains momentum and is eventually consumed by its own propulsion. The piece is virtuosic in every way, yet there are flexible moments in which each performance can be different.

Mingjia Chen – floatwalking (2018)

foatwalking is inspired by hearing author Andrew Forsthoefel speak about travelling across America on foot, listening to the stories of the people he met along the way and describing the various types of walking he experienced.

Gabriella Smith – Carrot Revolution (2015)

I wrote Carrot Revolution in 2015 for my friends the Aizuri Quartet. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for their exhibition The Order of Things, in which they commissioned three visual artists and myself to respond to Dr. Barnes’ distinctive “ensembles,” the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture.

While walking around the Barnes, looking for inspiration for this string quartet, I suddenly remembered a Cézanne quote I’d heard years ago (though which I later learned was misattributed to him): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” And I knew immediately that my piece would be called Carrot Revolution.

I envisioned the piece as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet – a 250-year-old genre – as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.

Caroline Shaw – Entr’acte (2011)

Entr’acte was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 — with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.

Paul Wiancko – LIFT (2016)
Part I
Part II
Part III: Glacial – Maniacal – Lift

LIFT is an investigation of elation in its musical form. Inspired by the Aizuri Quartet’s gift for group expressiveness and virtuosity, I joyously explored the capacity for harmony, color, and rhythm itself to evoke and inspire. Though I drew heavily from my experience as a chamber musician to articulate its many interlocking parts, the piece ultimately represents the journey of a soul – laid out in fervent, celebratory detail.”