Verona Quartet: Shatter
Bright Shiny Things
Verona Quartet members Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro (violins), Abigail Rojansky (viola), and Jonathan Dormand (cello) are certainly conversant with the standard string quartet repertoire, but they're as comfortable premiering new commissioned works and collaborating with like-minded artists from other disciplines. Exemplifying the latter, the quartet has worked with the folk trio I'm With Her and engaged in a performance with Brooklyn's Dance Heginbotham and a live-performance art installation with artist Ana Prvacki. Such open-mindedness bodes well for the ongoing vitality of the group.
Consistent with that approach is its sophomore album, Shatter, its very title referencing the breaking down of conventional barriers; in this case, that means opening up the quartet's music to three young American composers whose works explore markedly different realms. Whereas the group's 2021 debut album Diffusion presented renditions of quartets by Janacek, Ravel, and Szymanowski, Shatter features world-premiere recordings of pieces by Reena Esmail (b. 1983), Julia Adolphe (b. 1988), and Michael Gilbertson (b. 1987).
A striking interlacing of Western and Eastern traditions, Esmail's four-part String Quartet (Ragamala) augments the quartet with the vocal artistry of acclaimed Hindustani singer Saili Oak. The Mumbai native's vocalizing elevates the performance tremendously, but the playing by the quartet members is as strong. At the start of “Fantasie (Bihag),” all four players generate supplicating expressions that immediately draw the listener into the work's mesmerizing world; when Oak joins moments later and the strings become a drone for her to emote over, the music grows even more powerful. As that initial vocal episode ends, the strings resume their lyrical playing, with one outpouring following another. The music is characterized by meditative stillness yet also soars ecstatically. Like the opening movement, “Scherzo (Malkauns)” begins peacefully but quickly grows animated with Oak's rapid vocal gestures joined by dance-inflected figures by the strings. As expected, “Recitative (Basant)” is comparatively calmer but no less bewitching. During the playful closing movement “Rondo (Jog),” Western elements emerge more conspicuously in the string writing without excessively altering the identity established by the first three. One of the key things recommending the work is that all of the string players are democratically featured, with Dormand and Rojansky as prominent in the performance as Ong and Ro.
Esmail's twenty-six-minute creation is a tough act to follow, and, admittedly, the ones by Adolphe and Gilbertson are a tad overshadowed by it. Broached on their own terms, however, both hold up solidly enough. The movement titles of Adolphe's fifteen-minute Star-Crossed Signals derive from nautical signals used by ships at sea, with “Delta” relaying the message “Keep clear of me; I am moving with difficulty” and “X-ray” meaning “Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals”; “Kilo,” on the other hand, stands for “I wish to communicate with you.” Stabbing gestures open “Delta X-ray” arrestingly, but episodes of ghostly shudder provide a counterweight to passages of frenetic rupture. In some moments, the strings seem pleading and vulnerable, in others, aggressive and violent. “Kilo Kilo” slowly builds from a haunting, fragile intro into an elegiac expression of mounting intensity. At a general level, the work might be seen as a meditation on themes of dominance, empowerment, and connection.
A finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, Gilbertson's Verona-commissioned Quartet was in progress during the period of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and evolved into a personal reaction to those events. Feeling compelled to create something comforting, the composer imbued the opening movement “Mother Chords” with lustrous string filigrees and infused the acrobatically agile second, “Simple Sugars,” with the kind of explosive energy associated with the rush sugary intake engenders. “Mother Chords” does, in fact, soothe with harmonious yearning and rhythmic energy suggestive of children joyfully playing, and issues of healing and instant gratification are imaginatively juxtaposed in Gilbertson's fifteen-minute statement.
Verona Quartet has been called a “string quartet for the 21st century,” and this latest project supports the claim. The quartet's name, in part, nods to Shakespeare but even more importantly to the associated notion of storytelling. Certainly all three of the diverse creations on this fine sophomore release have compelling stories to share and are worth attending to for both their content and the quartet's superb realizations.
September 2023