The String Orchestra of Brooklyn: afterimage
Furious Artisans

The String Orchestra of Brooklyn (SOB) and its conductor Eli Spindel couldn't have chosen a better programme for its debut album, recorded in 2016 but only now seeing release. Rather than present interpretations of unrelated early and contemporary works, the company selected pieces that connect brilliantly. Christopher Cerrone's High Windows (2013) and Jacob Cooper's Stabat Mater Dolorosa (2009) are followed by the two pieces to which they're respectively tied, Niccolò Paganini's Caprice No. 6, written in the early 1800s, and the first movement of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's 1736 work, Stabat Mater, “Stabat Mater Dolorosa.” Effectively articulating what the contemporary works do, Spindel says they “take as their starting point a single moment from an older work and—through processes of repetition, distortion, and, in the case of the Stabat Mater, extreme slow-motion—create a completely new soundscape, like opening up a small door into an unfamiliar world.” SOB's augmented on afterimage by special guests, the Argus Quartet for Cerrone's, soprano Mellissa Hughes and mezzo-soprano Kate Maroney for Cooper's, and Maroney again for the Pergolesi; the orchestra rests, on the other hand, for the Paganini, with violinist Rachel Lee Priday performing alone. The cumulative results are, in a word, stunning.

When a mournful theme appears that's as stirring as any by Arvo Pärt, it's not hard to understand why High Windows has become one of Cerrone's most popular and performed works. Drawing for inspiration from both the windows of St. Ann's Church in Brooklyn and a Philip Larkin poem, the thirteen-minute sonata incorporates a fragment from Paganini's Caprice into its opening section before a quote from one of Cerrone's own, Hoyt-Schermerhorn, emerges at the work's centre. Opening with swirling trills emblematic of the early Caprice, the material instantly captivates; it's the elegiac section that follows, however, that's the most stirring. As ghostly string figures establish atmosphere, the sorrowful theme makes its first appearance, the potency of its anguished expression as it builds in intensity impossible to resist.

High Windows sets an effective stage for Cooper's incredible Stabat Mater Dolorosa, which was inspired in part by the composer's fascination with empirical studies examining the extreme temporal arrestation that occurs when someone's involved in a near-death experience, be it a car crash or elevator plummet. Wanting to explore the concept in his own work, Cooper applied time-stretching to the first movement of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. The treatment gives the twenty-eight-minute performance a quality vaguely similar to the digitally time-slowed versions of songs producers have posted to YouTube, 800%-elongated makeovers of The Beatle's “Because” and Pink Floyd's “Breathe,” for instance. In all such cases, the character of the original is radically transformed, even if audible traces of it remain. What separates Cooper's treatment of Stabat Mater apart, however, is that it's executed in real-time and thus all the more captivating for being so. In its slow, incremental rise and supplicating tone, it also shares certain properties with Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, but don't mistake Stabat Mater Dolorosa for a derivative exercise. Cooper's piece stands up on its own magnificently, so much so one could picture concertgoers completely enthralled during its presentation.

In its opening part, string tones stretch out for seemingly minutes on end, each phrase adding to the accumulating mass as a meditative, reverential mood is instated, the tone consistent with text concerned with maternal grief. Like the strings, the singers' voices stretch out, each syllable of the Latin material extended to an imagined breaking point, until the closing minutes where vocalizing's delivered at a more conventional tempo. In this slow-motion treatment, episodes occur where the arrangement reduces to a skeletal core before building up again, and shifts in melody transpire so slowly every fluctuation in pitch can be monitored. Occasional tonal dissonances lend the piece a woozy, even somewhat sickly quality that in a strange way enhances this remarkable rendering of Cooper's creation.

Nicknamed “The Trill” for clearly audible reasons, Paganini's Caprice No. 6 is given a powerful solo reading by Priday, the violinist deftly voicing tremolo in the left hand while articulating the melody with the right in the five-minute performance. Though brief at three-and-a-half minutes, Pergolesi's own “Stabat Mater Dolorosa” is distinguished by the elegant intertwining of Hughes and Maroney' voices and the stately backdrop provided by the SOB. Interesting too that the tone of the original sounds so bright, buoyant, and carefree when heard next to the time-stretched version.

January 2020