DIGITAL REVIEW — A slew of string quartets crop up time and again with recordings of both standard repertoire and new music. While the musicianship never fails to impress, the sheer number of new groups and works composed for them can make your head spin, so when I saw that the Anzû Quartet was not another string quartet but one for violin, cello, clarinet, and piano, I was immediately intrigued. The Brooklyn-based ensemble’s debut album, adjust, on Cantaloupe Music, features music by contemporary composers Ken Thomson and Anna Webber.
The group’s makeup pays tribute to Messiaen’s wartime chamber masterpiece Quatuor pour la fin du temps, composed for a small group of instruments that were available at a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, where it was premiered in 1941. The Anzû Quartet — violinist Olivia De Prato, cellist Ashley Bathgate, clarinetist Ken Thomson, and pianist Karl Larson — was formed in 2020 with the express purpose of commissioning and performing new works for this unusual combination. An album that includes Messiaen’s piece is already in the works for release later this year.
But for their debut recording, the quartet presents two anxious and anxiety-inducing new pieces, each around 20 minutes long, that aim to reflect our shared distress as a society over the last several years, hinging on the pandemic and the social turmoil that followed. This is edge-of-your-seat chamber music that challenges the ear and the mind, fusing jazz — both composers are primarily jazz and avant-garde instrumentalists — and contemporary classical within formal structures.
Thomson’s three-part Uneasy — read: both restless and not easy to play — was the first piece written for the group, between 2017 and 2019. It follows a traditional fast-slow-fast structure, with a dirge-like coda. It’s an abrasive, nervy, and intense piece, churning along in unpredictable rhythms and unstable harmonies that jar the ear. Thomson being the clarinetist for the group — he also plays in the Bang on a Can All-Stars — it’s not surprising that he displays the most idiomatic personality in his writing for his instrument, starting with the first movement, which takes off from ascending unisons for clarinet and violin.
In the slower second movement, the clarinet weaves a halting melody over light pizzicatos from the strings; the melody repeats with subtle variations as the texture thickens and the music swells. This brings us back to the unisons of the beginning, with sneakily ascending motifs. Things gradually heat up into a soaring fever pitch that unleashes a barrage of fiery 32nd notes from the piano and clarinet in the low end of the register and then brought back to the top of the scale by the strings and a wailing clarinet. The slow coda that ends Uneasy introduces the work’s most consonant chord progression — a calm resolution to the clamor that came before.
Webber is a jazz flutist and saxophonist who has collaborated with veteran player Roscoe Mitchell, from the venerable group Art Ensemble of Chicago; although she has composed music before, adjust, from 2022, is her first piece for which she is not one of the performers. It is a strident post-pandemic jazz-classical piece, neatly structured into five parts and calling for controlled improvisation and extended techniques, the most unusual of which are a clothespin attached to the G-string of the violin and a kind of paper boat made of tin foil and weighed down with coins placed on the lowest strings of the piano to create a rattling resonance.
For parts 1, 3, and 5, pianist Larson writes in his detailed liner notes, Webber asks the players to improvise by introducing a “range clef” in which “gestures are written with specific rhythms but no pitches. While the general shape of the gesture is visually outlined by floating noteheads (ascending vs. descending shapes), the performer is free to choose specific pitches.” In part 1, the quartet doesn’t so much play the music as crash it in, with acoustically distorted chords — the howling multiphonics in Thomson’s clarinet are impressive — and percussive clicks, all of which come back in repeated, blustery episodes that are interspersed with thinner, spidery sections.
The squeaky unisons of part 2 screech and then freeze in time, the stop-and-go motion making for an exercise in shifting rhythmic patterns and tight-knit group interplay, with pitches that frantically see-saw from one tonal extreme to the other. The queasy part 3 starts taking shape from seemingly haphazard scratches, thin wheezes, pitchless sounds, and skeletal rhythmic figures. The ingredients gradually build into a more congruent harmonic texture in the second half, with the piano adding a tonal backbone and the violin and cello taking turns to intone a pensive melody. But then the harmonic basis disintegrates again into chaos. A quiet meditation for solo piano follows, introducing a clarinet solo that eases its way into the chord progression set by the other instruments. But the reprieve proves short-lived when the arresting crashing chords of the first movement return as a coda.
The Anzû Quartet is performing next at classicalNEXT in Berlin on May 13. The program includes these two exemplary pieces, as well as a new commission from the Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi and a preview of the group’s second album, featuring the famous piece by Messiaen.
