New York Classical Review

Ensemble Connect, the professional-development program for young musicians founded by Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School, came to the national birthday party Tuesday night with a bracingly diverse assortment of chamber music by American composers.

The umbrella of Carnegie’s festival “United in Sound: America at 250” proved wide enough to cover the fierce dissonances of George Lewis, the jazz poetry of Valerie Coleman, the Renaissance echoes of Samuel Barber, the churchy musings of Charles Ives, and the elegant ragtime of Scott Joplin, all in one evening at Weill Recital Hall.

A quintet of Connecters proved their mettle right away in Lewis’s aptly-named Broke, a 15-minute collision of razor-sharp musical shards in complex, stuttering rhythms. Flutist Cameron Cullen, clarinetist Nicole Martin, trumpeter Grace O’Connell, trombonist David Seder and pianist Joseph Yaz brought virtuoso-level skills to the New York premiere of this challenging work, a Carnegie Hall commission dated 2026, served hot from the composer’s pen.

“Struggle” was the key word in composer Lewis’s remarks on the piece, both from the stage and in the printed program. In this sequel to Lewis’s 2022 octet Breaking, the players vividly conveyed not only the urgency of the struggle but the exhaustion that followed, in passages of unearthly calm with a blues inflection and moments of ironic humor. The work closed forte and uncompromisingly dissonant, true to its mission of (the composer wrote) “[using] unpredictability and nonlinearity to refuse complacency.”

A gentler African-American spirit shone through Valerie Coleman’s Portraits of Langston, a 2007 tribute to poet Langston Hughes in six vignettes for flute, clarinet and piano. Musicians Cullen, Martin and Yaz took turns reading the Hughes poem that inspired each movement before playing it.

“Helen Keller” used lyrical lines and lush piano tone to convey the poet’s affection for, and wonder at, the famous blind and deaf woman’s engagement with the world. “Danse Africaine” painted a languid nocturnal vision in graceful lines down low in the clarinet. “Le Grand Duc Mambo” was an animated nightclub number with an adagio clarinet epilogue.

Flute and clarinet duetted without piano in “Silver Rain,” a dazzling shower of syncopations, followed by rich bell chords in the piano and long-breathed wind monologues. Cullen’s piccolo sparked “Parisian Cabaret,” a jittery, infectious dance-scherzo that closed in a steady stride rhythm. “Harlem’s Summer Night” inspired long flute lines over rich piano chords, with a sensuous clarinet woven through the texture, closing this picturesque suite on a peaceful note.

Barber’s Adagio for Strings sounded both mysterious and transparent in its original version for string quartet–mysterious in its Palestrina-like fluidity and inability to settle into a single key, transparent in the slow clockwork of countermelodies that hovered above and below the mournful steps of its indelible theme. The unwavering concentration of violinists Laurel Gagnon and Coco Mi, violist Abby Smith and cellist Elena Ariza held the audience spellbound.

The violinists exchanged chairs, with Mi taking the first and Gagnon the second, for Ives’s String Quartet No. 1, “From the Salvation Army”—a bit of whimsical Ivesian misdirection, since the first movement was composed for his counterpoint class at Yale and the subsequent three for the church where he was the organist. But the Christian charity, known for its musical appeals, no doubt availed itself of the same hymns and revival songs from which Ives concocted this early example of his polyrhythmic and piquantly dissonant style.

The first movement, titled Chorale, wove a hymn tune and fragments thereof into an Ivesian updating of Bach’s chorale prelude style, the players skillfully building sonorities to a vibrant chordal statement at the end. The Prelude (so named because the quartet originally began here, before Ives added the Chorale) was a capricious happy dance with quicksilver changes of tempo, which the players handled deftly.

In the Offertory, a pretty melody (the hymn tune “Nettleton”) unfolded over pizzicato accompaniment; an eventful development followed, which the quartet navigated well before closing on a long diminuendo to silence. The Postlude (marked Allegro marziale, a nod to the military bands that Ives’s father led) began with a snappy march, but developed this and other tunes with so many tempo changes that it took on the character of a theme and variations. The players closed the work satisfyingly with a swashbuckling coda.

Brief and expressive, Joplin’s piano rags “The Entertainer” and “Paragon Rag” might have served as encores, but they were listed with the other pieces in recognition of the composer’s considerable, if regrettably posthumous, influence on American music. Performing the quartet arrangements by Franz Beyer and William Zinn respectively, Ariza’s cello and Smith’s viola supplied the gentle stride while Mi and Gagnon gave a stringy slither to the piano’s syncopated tunes.

Ensemble Connect will perform works by Gabriella Smith, Nelhybel and Mozart, and a world premiere by Emily Liushen, 7:30 p.m. March 19 in Paul Recital Hall, The Juilliard School. Free admission, reservation required. juilliard.edu