Cassatt Quartet has mixed success vying with college lounge venue
University. Photo: Dario Acosta
Architecture is an under-appreciated quality in classical music. Music has duration, so a score can be seen as a blueprint for how to organize and shape the architecture of time. And music, recorded or live, is experienced in space, and that architecture has its own effects.
Wednesday night, the Cassatt String Quartet played in a space that in some ways was welcoming but in others put a damper on the music. The final event in this year’s Voices Up series (which is organized by composer Lawrence Kramer), the quartet played Dorothy Rudd Moore’s Modes, Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 14, and premiered Kramer’s String Quartet No, 3 “Beginning with Time” in the 12th Floor Lounge at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, where Kramer teaches.
The Cassatt keeps to a warm, old-school sound, woody and with a good amount of hefty vibrato. This was a fine pairing with all the pieces, which had roots in the classical, tonal string quartet tradition.
Moore’s piece was an admirable choice. An intelligent, elegant composer who passed away in 2022, she was one of the cofounders of the Society of Black Composers and she taught at various schools in New York City. Modes is a lyrical work with an uncanny quality of seeming from a time that may have existed only in cultural imagination. Written in 1968, it felt full of autumn colors, a sonification of pensive domestic dramas.
The quartet played this with care, but much of the music felt distant. Modes has an inward turning quality, but the lounge space was part of the problem. Though small and comfortable, it seemed best for a meeting or lecture. Carpeted and with all the lights on, the formalities of a normal classical music event felt out of place and artificial, and though the sound was clear and delicate, it had no resonance. Proximity to the musicians was meaningless, there was all the intimacy of listening to a stereo.
The quartet broke through this in the Bartókian third movement of Modes, but was mostly trapped in it again in the Shostakovich. There was too little character in this, and just not enough spryness in the playing, sharpness and bounce—the things that convey the inner energy that shows a grasp of the complex mix of humor and anxiety in the music. The character is sardonic, mordant, even a little crazed and also at times beatific, with a key repeated quote from Bach. The notes and rhythms were there, but the spirit was missing,
For Kramer’s quartet, character was also an issue. This seemed more of a technical issue. The composer described the work as an outline of experiences of time, in an extended variations form in five sections, delineated by tempo: slower-faster-slower-faster-slower. But it was impossible to discern any substantial modulations in tempo, and with Kramer’s consistent approach to crafting his material via intervals and the direction of the counterpoint, this had an expressive monotony.
In the fourth section, the shape of the music expanded, more light and air came in, and this was enough to push past the limitations of the space for what was a lovely sound and brightening, more complex mood, leaving one with a more optimistic impression of the music and the Cassatt.
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