Aizuri Quartet: Blueprinting
New Amsterdam Records

Since its 2012 founding, the NYC-based Aizuri Quartet (its name a reference to a style of predominantly blue Japanese woodblock printing) has dedicated itself to both performing standards in the repertoire and contemporary works by young up-and-comers. One therefore might have expected the debut album by violinists Ariana Kim and Miho Saegusa, violist Ayane Kozasa, and cellist Karen Ouzounian to include examples of both, but to the group's credit, they've chosen not to play it safe, with Blueprinting instead presenting five works written between 2015 and 2017 for the quartet.

There are clear advantages to the approach: firstly, the players can collaborate with the composer through the rehearsal, workshop, and performance stages before the recording's made, and further to that not be burdened by comparisons to other groups' recorded versions. Over time, the works by Lembit Beecher, Yevgeniy Sharlat, Caroline Shaw, Gabriella Smith, and Paul Wiancko became mainstays of Aizuri's repertoire and were therefore natural candidates for this debut offering, and the evidence at hand suggests that the greatest possible connection was made between performer and composer as the project worked towards its completion.

In reflecting the quartet's adventurous spirit, Smith's Carrot Revolution proves an apt scene-setter in the way it boldly juxtaposes different techniques and sounds. Glissandi and percussive effects clash with aggressive sawing and countrified fiddling in a single-movement work inspired by a Barnes Foundation exhibit pairing paintings and objects. Brace yourself for a fluid, action-packed, and occasionally woozy flow of ideas and references, with the material even at one moment seemingly working a snippet of “Baba O'Riley” into its design. Shaw's Blueprint brings forth the quartet's lyrical side in a setting that, by the composer's own description, is both an harmonic reduction of Beethoven's string quartet Op. 18 No. 6 and a ‘conversation' between him and his teacher Haydn. Ultimately, however, the piece plays like a record of Shaw applying her contemporary sensibility to a prismatic refracting of their material.

Though Sharlat's RIPEFG might appear oddly titled, it's actually a fairly direct reference to his former student and fellow composer Ethan Frederick Greene, whose death paralyzed Sharlat for months. Suitably passionate, intense, and heartfelt, the two-movement tribute alternates between grief-stricken passages and plaintive ones, perhaps signifying his intention to thread into the work's design the extreme emotions experienced by those grieving the passing of a dear friend; purposeful, too, is Sharlat's incorporation of melodica, an instrument Greene often brought to lessons with his teacher. Characterized by the composer as “an investigation of elation in musical form,” Wiancko's three-part LIFT concludes the recording with an explorative examination of music's building blocks: harmony, colour, and rhythm. It's less wild than Smith's contribution though, with impish and elegiac moments in plentiful supply, as wide-ranging in mood, and compared to Sharlat's certainly more driven by joy than grief.

Beecher's Sophia's Wide Awake Dreams is the most sonically striking of the works featured due to the inclusion of nine custom-built sound sculptures that generate sound from bike wheels and wine glasses. Derived from the composer's chamber opera Sophia's Forest, which depicts the inner world of a nine-year-old girl who arrives in the US with her mother after her father disappeared in a civil war, the two movements are fragile, mysterious dreamworlds that play like impressionistic transcriptions of the young girls' inner state as she tries to make sense of the world around her and deals with the residue of disturbing memories.

December 2018