Aizuri Quartet @ Dallas Chamber Music Society
—Review by Gregory Sullivan Isaacs
On Sunday afternoon, the Dallas Chamber Music Society presented the Grammy-nominated Aizuri Quartet. The venue was Caruth Auditorium on the campus of Southern Methodist University. The talented young players were Emma Frucht and Miho Saegusa, violins; Ayane Kozasa, viola; and Karen Ouzounian, cello.
The lineup of pieces was interesting but curious at the same time. It was listed as a program built around the concept of night into sunrise. The Haydn “Sunrise” quartet closed the program, but it was more difficult to discern how the other works fit into the concept of “night.”
The concert opened with Clara Schumann’s lovely song “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen” (translated—I stood darkly dreaming) from a poem by Heinrich Heine. Clara, best known as a pianist, was the wife of Robert Schumann, best known as a composer. She wrote the song as a Christmas present to Robert soon after their wedding. The text describes the pain of separated lovers and imagines them gazing at each other's picture. Clara added a postlude that brightens the mood. The arrangement for string quartet was written by cellist Karen Ouzounian and was thoughtfully performed by the group.
However, the notion of “night” led to some unsettling selections on the way to Haydn’s sunrise. While Bela Bartok’s String Quartet #4 is one of the masterpieces in the repertoire, is it “night music”? Many of us have experienced such restless toss-and-turn nights, so perhaps that’s what the selection meant to imply. Rather than placid night music, Bartok’s quartet is intense, unrelenting, severe, and exciting. It creates its smashing dissonance by the close and tone-cluster voicing of the individual lines. Right from the opening attack, the quartet gave it an appropriately bold and fierce performance.
After intermission, the quartet presented a truly unusual piece titled Sivunittinni (“the future ones”), by composer Tanya Tagaq (b.1975). She is best known as an Inuit throat singer, author, and cultural representative. The Inuit are the indigenous people of the Arctic and Subarctic regions of Alaska, Greenland and Northwest Canada. Throat singing is based on vocal effects such as sighing and guttural noises. It is more a vocalization than singing as we know it, and is considered one of the oldest singing styles that still survives.
Tagaq’s piece began as a vocal improvisation on a poem she wrote herself. However, Sivunittinni was adapted into the form presented by Aizuri by the famously experimental Kronos String Quartet. It uses symbolic notation to direct the players on how to make the unusual sounds required. This is so out-of-the-ordinary that there is even an “instructional video” made by Kronos to explain everything to the hapless players. You can find it at this web site if you are curious: (http://50ftf.kronosquartet.org/composers/tanya-tagaq)
The sound is reminiscent of the experimental music craze that started in the late 1960s and exhausted itself in the 1990s. I am reminded of a review given to such a composer that praised all of the “new sounds” produced on the stage. In this vein, Tagaq’s work grunts, cries in pain, wheezes, groans, and even screams. Another restless night, I suppose.
Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet (Opus 76 No. 4) opened the curtains and brought in the longed-for glint of sunlight. The quartet gave this joyous work an appropriately bright performance and noticeably used a variety of vibrato techniques, from none to warm, to add to their colorful performance.
My final impression was that the well-played program, firmly centered in the middle ranges of the sound spectrum, could have used more brilliance. Perhaps this was because of where I was seated, although I moved to the opposite side at intermission. And maybe it was a reflection of the quartet’s evocative name, Aizuri, which comes from a Japanese art form that mostly uses muted blue colors.
WEB: For more information on the quartet— Aizuri Quartet
