textura

Miró Quartet: Home
Pentatone

Imaginative programming and inspired performances distinguish Home, Miró Quartet's aptly titled sophomore release on Pentatone and label follow-up to its recording of Beethoven's complete string quartets. Arriving after that massive statement, the intimacy of Home is even more pronounced than it otherwise would be. Each of its five selections has something to recommend it, be it the melodic allure of Kevin Puts' title piece and the set-ending treatment of Harold Arlen's beloved “Over the Rainbow” or the ongoing appeal of Samuel Barber's String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11 and the freshness of Caroline Shaw's inaugural volume of Microfictions. On this diverse, sixty-six-minute release, these American composers explore what home means and how integral it is to our lives, identity, and well-being, the sentiment succinctly expressed at the end of The Wizard of Oz in Dorothy's familiar words, “There's no place like home.”

In their respective pieces (both written for Miró Quartet, by the way), the two living composers build on the artistic success achieved in earlier ones, the opera The Hours (2022) in Puts' case and the Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Partita for 8 Voices (2019-12) in Shaw's. Struck by the sight in 2017 of Syrians fleeing their home country to seek refuge in Europe, Puts wrote the work to explore how it feels to be forcibly driven from home by violence, conflict, and war. Though he completed the poignant piece two years later, in-concert premieres scheduled for 2020 had to be canceled because of the pandemic, and performances were instead live-streamed from the group members' literal homes in Austin, Texas. Fittingly, the trajectory exemplified by the three movements replaces the feeling of gratitude associated with the security and comfort of home in the plaintive first (“Warm, with rubato”) with turbulence and anguish as displacement arrives in the furiously animated second (“Faster, refreshed”) until the eventual return home in the initially seething third (“Dangerously fast”) brings with it a brief allusion to the melodic material from the work's opening.

The pandemic also figured into the creation of Shaw's Microfictions [volume 1]. Sheltering in her Manhattan apartment, she happened online upon T. R. Darling's so-called “Microfictions,” daily posts of prose pieces exuding a science fiction-like character. Inspired by the idea, Shaw set about writing six texts of her own that she wedded to music, the beguiling result a work characteristic of the composer in its originality, imagination, humour, and beauty; it hardly surprises that this idiosyncratic creation would be one of the more unique pieces in Miró Quartet's repertoire, and with Shaw herself dispassionately intoning the enigmatic texts the work assumes an all the more personalized quality. The material engages structurally too, in that one tends to muse upon the words that begin the movement as the music plays after. Representative of the work, “Under the hot sun…”and “The photographs smeared…” captivate not only for their texts but for the evocative string effects—harmonics, glissandos, and pizzicati, to name three—Shaw incorporates into these lyrical, at times baroque-inflected musical expressions. In a side-long nod to Miró Quartet, “Waking up on the early side…” name-checks Joan Miró whilst also cheekily referencing Mendelssohn. As varied as the presentation is in the six parts, the material nonetheless bears Shaw's unmistakable stamp as a composer.

Having been included in a number of film soundtracks over the past half-century, the second movement of Barber's quartet, separately known as the “Adagio for Strings,” has become an indelible part of the fabric of twentieth-century musical life. Let's not forget, however, that that famous part constitutes one of three movements in the original and that the passionate framing ones merit attention too. The dramatic opening movement (“Molto allegro e appassionato”) immediately arrests the ear with the fervour and intensity of its aggressive passages but also the heartfelt character of its gentler folk-tinged episodes. The latter set the stage for the mournful central movement (“Molto adagio”), a magnificent one-for-the-ages elegy given a moving performance by the string quartet.

Like “Adagio for Strings,” “Molto adagio,” the slow second movement from Walker's first string quartet (1946), has come to assume a standalone identity as “Lyric for Strings.” Originally called “Lament” in early iterations of the full work, the dignified material was written in fond memory of his grandmother Malvina King, who was born a slave in the American South and was clearly loved by her grandson (apparently he regularly referred to it as “my grandma's piece”). Poignant also is the quartet's heartfelt rendering of Arlen's “Over the Rainbow,” with the arrangement by William Ryden amplifying the song's tenderness and vulnerability. As the strains of the classic fade away, let's not forget that home doesn't always mean comfort, stability, and safety, and is not always a choice; for some, it's the place where they were born but can't leave, for others a poverty-stricken shelter offering the barest means of survival. As the quartet eloquently states in liner notes, “A ‘homeless' person paradoxically is not actually a person without a home, but one whose home is the harshness and danger of the streets, a damaging life context that becomes just as woven physically, mentally, and spiritually into their identity as the castle and crown is woven into a king's.” Refugees likewise have a home, just not the one they wanted it to be. All such ruminations come into play as one delves deeply into the material the group presents with conviction on Home.

August 2024


	Miró Quartet: Home Pentatone Imaginative programming and inspired performances distinguish Home, Miró Quartet's aptly titled sophomore release on Pentatone and label follow-up to its recording of Beethoven's complete string quartets. Arriving after that massive statement, the intimacy of Home is even more pronounced than it otherwise would be. Each of its five selections has something to recommend it, be it the melodic allure of Kevin Puts' title piece and the set-ending treatment of Harold Arlen's beloved “Over the Rainbow” or the ongoing appeal of Samuel Barber's String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11 and the freshness of Caroline Shaw's inaugural volume of Microfictions. On this diverse, sixty-six-minute release, these American composers explore what home means and how integral it is to our lives, identity, and well-being, the sentiment succinctly expressed at the end of The Wizard of Oz in Dorothy's familiar words, “There's no place like home.” In their respective pieces (both written for Miró Quartet, by the way), the two living composers build on the artistic success achieved in earlier ones, the opera The Hours (2022) in Puts' case and the Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Partita for 8 Voices (2019-12) in Shaw's. Struck by the sight in 2017 of Syrians fleeing their home country to seek refuge in Europe, Puts wrote the work to explore how it feels to be forcibly driven from home by violence, conflict, and war. Though he completed the poignant piece two years later, in-concert premieres scheduled for 2020 had to be canceled because of the pandemic, and performances were instead live-streamed from the group members' literal homes in Austin, Texas. Fittingly, the trajectory exemplified by the three movements replaces the feeling of gratitude associated with the security and comfort of home in the plaintive first (“Warm, with rubato”) with turbulence and anguish as displacement arrives in the furiously animated second (“Faster, refreshed”) until the eventual return home in the initially seething third (“Dangerously fast”) brings with it a brief allusion to the melodic material from the work's opening. The pandemic also figured into the creation of Shaw's Microfictions [volume 1]. Sheltering in her Manhattan apartment, she happened online upon T. R. Darling's so-called “Microfictions,” daily posts of prose pieces exuding a science fiction-like character. Inspired by the idea, Shaw set about writing six texts of her own that she wedded to music, the beguiling result a work characteristic of the composer in its originality, imagination, humour, and beauty; it hardly surprises that this idiosyncratic creation would be one of the more unique pieces in Miró Quartet's repertoire, and with Shaw herself dispassionately intoning the enigmatic texts the work assumes an all the more personalized quality. The material engages structurally too, in that one tends to muse upon the words that begin the movement as the music plays after. Representative of the work, “Under the hot sun…”and “The photographs smeared…” captivate not only for their texts but for the evocative string effects—harmonics, glissandos, and pizzicati, to name three—Shaw incorporates into these lyrical, at times baroque-inflected musical expressions. In a side-long nod to Miró Quartet, “Waking up on the early side…” name-checks Joan Miró whilst also cheekily referencing Mendelssohn. As varied as the presentation is in the six parts, the material nonetheless bears Shaw's unmistakable stamp as a composer. Having been included in a number of film soundtracks over the past half-century, the second movement of Barber's quartet, separately known as the “Adagio for Strings,” has become an indelible part of the fabric of twentieth-century musical life. Let's not forget, however, that that famous part constitutes one of three movements in the original and that the passionate framing ones merit attention too. The dramatic opening movement (“Molto allegro e appassionato”) immediately arrests the ear with the fervour and intensity of its aggressive passages but also the heartfelt character of its gentler folk-tinged episodes. The latter set the stage for the mournful central movement (“Molto adagio”), a magnificent one-for-the-ages elegy given a moving performance by the string quartet. Like “Adagio for Strings,” “Molto adagio,” the slow second movement from Walker's first string quartet (1946), has come to assume a standalone identity as “Lyric for Strings.” Originally called “Lament” in early iterations of the full work, the dignified material was written in fond memory of his grandmother Malvina King, who was born a slave in the American South and was clearly loved by her grandson (apparently he regularly referred to it as “my grandma's piece”). Poignant also is the quartet's heartfelt rendering of Arlen's “Over the Rainbow,” with the arrangement by William Ryden amplifying the song's tenderness and vulnerability. As the strains of the classic fade away, let's not forget that home doesn't always mean comfort, stability, and safety, and is not always a choice; for some, it's the place where they were born but can't leave, for others a poverty-stricken shelter offering the barest means of survival. As the quartet eloquently states in liner notes, “A ‘homeless' person paradoxically is not actually a person without a home, but one whose home is the harshness and danger of the streets, a damaging life context that becomes just as woven physically, mentally, and spiritually into their identity as the castle and crown is woven into a king's.” Refugees likewise have a home, just not the one they wanted it to be. All such ruminations come into play as one delves deeply into the material the group presents with conviction on Home. August 2024