Miller Theater Early Music Series, Church of St. Mary the Virgin
December 4, 2025
By Christian Carey
NEW YORK – The choral ensemble The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips, are regular visitors to Manhattan, and their December concerts at Church of St. Mary the Virgin have a devoted following (pardon the pun). Often they perform a Marian-themed program appropriate to the space, and their appearance this past Thursday was no exception. In addition to pieces principally drawn from the English Renaissance, a new Salve Regina setting by the composer-organist Matthew Martin, was premiered.
The Tallis Scholars have a membership of ten, with three sopranos, three altos, two tenors, and two basses. Much of the music that they sing, including that of the Tudor composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, who were featured on the concert, was written for a setup with quintets at the front of a sanctuary on either side. At St. Mary’s, the voices were more often deployed in sections instead, although some alternate groupings allowed for the ensemble, or parts thereof, to explore the sonorous space in which they were singing.
The group is named after Tallis, who was the preeminent composer for the Tudor monarchs, and the program included movements from his Missa puer natus. William Byrd’s music was also well represented, with five of his motets presented in the framework of a Votive Mass of the Virgin. Alternating the sections of the mass with Byrd’s music highlighted the affinities between the two composers, whose Latin church music incorporates tightly knit imitative passages and, in places, dissonance created by spicy cross-relations.
Martin’s piece was a Miller Theatre commission, and it was both well written for the voices of the group while using crunchy added-note chords and intricate rhythms in keeping with the sound world of contemporary choral music. It was prefaced by the Salve Regina chant, a touching preamble to what was to be a moving work. Vivid text-painting detailed the sorrows and grief of Mary and the exhortations of the faithful, with hushed bass-register chords, the texture gradually evolving to be pierced by trumpet motives in the soprano voices and snug verticals in the rest of the ensemble. The middle section is declamatory, moving to a fevered climax in which suffering is depicted in a yawping tutti. The earlier ambience returns in a brief coda, which settles into sumptuous harmonies depicting the earnest plea for mercy that concludes the text. The Tallis Scholars have performed other contemporary music, notably that of Arvo Pärt, and they were accurate and ardent interpreters here. One hopes that Martin, who was not in attendance, gets to hear their rendition soon.
The program concluded with a Magnificat setting by John Nesbitt, taken from the Eton Choirbook, one of the rare remnants of a beautiful repertory of pieces from the fifteenth century. Most of the manuscripts of this music did not survive the Puritans’ destruction of Catholic liturgical materials during the seventeenth century. The piece alternated verses chanted by the tenors with full polyphony. Like many pieces in the Eton Choirbook, Nesbitt’s contained considerably intricate polyrhythms, with triplets set against duplets. Both chant and tutti passages were sung with dulcet-toned fluidity.
As an encore, Salva nos domine by the French composer Jean Mouton gave the audience a tantalizingly brief hearing of music from continental Europe.
Painful footsteps are behind me
Here you stand so clear and far
Through the willows all I see
is a lonely burning star –Thor Lange, “Sun at Rest”
Cellist Kirstine Elise Pedersen and bassist Mathæus Bech, a.k.a. LuLo, came together through a shared fascination with the singular, often-misunderstood Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893–1952). Their approach to his music is both reverent and daring. Rather than treating the scores as sacred artifacts, they dismantled them lovingly, listening closely to recordings, transcribing passages by ear, and distilling sprawling works—from piano pieces to string quartets and symphonies—down to a page or less of melody and harmony. From there, they rebuilt them intuitively, as if they were fragments of folk music handed down orally rather than concert works locked behind museum glass.
The resulting album is inseparable from its physical form: a book-object accompanied by archival photographs and artistic images by Bech, along with notes that gesture toward the times, places, and emotional climates that shaped Langgaard’s life.
Said life haunts the music at every turn. A prodigy who performed his first concert at 11 and saw his first symphony performed by the Berlin Philharmonic to great acclaim, Langgaard soon found himself at odds with the musical establishment. His eccentricity and refusal to remain stylistically obedient—shifting from late Romanticism into something more abrasive, prophetic, even anarchic—left him increasingly isolated. Colleagues mocked him; institutions ignored him. Out of seeming desperation, he wrote oblique instructions like “repeat for all eternity” or “repeat with a crescendo until either the piano or your fingers break.” Of the roughly 400 works he composed, only a tenth were performed during his lifetime, often at his own expense. Eventually, weary of his complaints, the cultural elite arranged for him to be quietly exiled to a post as a church organist at the far end of the country. Langgaard accepted, despite knowing full well the intention behind the offer. He died largely forgotten, his music surfacing again only in the present century, like a message in a bottle.
LuLo’s interpretations capture this sense of restless compression with the utmost attention to detail. The album opens in a state of delicate agitation with pieces like “Cowbells in the Pine Forest,” where fluttering textures suggest jangling metal or distant movement before a melody emerges with the pale light of rural dawn. This deeply illustrative quality recurs throughout the record, pastoral on the surface but threaded with unease.
Tensions between gratitude and suspicion run through original compositions like Bech’s “Thankful” and “Waltz for Rued,” the latter inspired by Langgaard’s Andante Religioso for violin and organ (BVN407). These pieces glisten briefly, like dew left as an offering, yet they never lose contact with an underlying darkness. Joy here is fragile, provisional, always shadowed by the knowledge of what followed.
The folk impulse comes into sharper focus on tracks such as “Swedish,” where droning textures give way to a melody both exuberant and tense. Gorgeous dissonances and a sense of forlorn joy suggest music shaped by communal memory rather than personal triumph. That same feeling carries into “Sun at Rest” (BVN 136). Originally for string quartet and soprano, this iteration features Kira Martini’s voice moving with gentle inevitability through a melancholy landscape without ever becoming merely bucolic.
Elsewhere, motion takes over. “God’s Will” is reduced from its originally massive scoring to a pulsing, cinematic drive that advances with locomotive persistence, while “Passing Train,” Pedersen’s response to the second movement of String Quartet No. 2 (BVN145), leans fully into programmatic imagery. Rhythm becomes destiny, propulsion its own kind of meaning. Even the cosmic unrest of “Music of the Spheres” (BVN 128), with its theological visions of Antichrist and salvation, feels grounded here, less apocalyptic spectacle than ceaseless spiritual pressure pushing through space and time.
Some of the album’s most revelatory moments arise through extreme condensation. LuLo’s reimagining of material from String Quartet No. 3 (BVN183) strips the work down to its nervous system, revealing a surprising jazz-inflected modernity. Elastic phrasing and rhythmic instability expose Langgaard not as an anachronism, but as a composer perpetually out of joint with his own era. Pieces like “Ixion” (from Symphony No. 11, BVN303) dance cautiously, never fully leaving the ground, their instability suggesting sandcastles built with full knowledge of the tide.
As the album darkens, disquiet gives way to exhaustion. “Eventually Mad” (BVN371) and “The Restless Wind” (BVN149) feel vast and elegiac, drifting like unanswered prayers. This sense of terminal weariness reaches its quiet apex in “Tired,” again featuring Martini, whose voice moves rhythmically through a landscape of ashen flowers. It is a song not just of rest from labor, but from life itself.
By the time The Restless draws to a close, the title feels less like a description of nervous energy or creative compulsion and more like a metaphysical condition. Langgaard’s life suggests what happens when faith, imagination, and sensitivity collide with institutional indifference, when vision outpaces comprehension. LuLo does not attempt to resolve this tension or redeem it with posthumous triumph. Instead, the musicians sit with it, listening carefully.
In doing so, the album poses a quiet but unsettling question: What does it mean to be heard, and when does listening finally arrive too late? We are given no answers, only the sense that music, even when ignored or misunderstood, continues to move forward, carried by those willing to approach it as something living. In that persistence lies both consolation and sorrow, as a lonely burning star glimpsed through the willows, still shining long after the footsteps have faded.
Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, by Laura Emmery, Cambridge Elements, Music Since 1945, Cambridge University Press.
Laura Emmery has done a great deal of analytical research on the music of Elliott Carter, and her book on his string quartets is a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning how he composes. Emmery’s latest publication is part of Cambridge University Press’s Elements series, one of several slender and specific books that each deal with a particular topic. Here, it is Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, which was composed in 1950-’51 and is widely regarded as a watershed work in the composer’s output, as well as a key example of High Modernism. Rather than focus on technical elements of the music, Emmery looks at the genesis and reception history of the piece. Biographical myths that, with the help of sympathetic people in Carter’s circle, have persisted are called into question. The co-opting by American government officials of homegrown modernist music to use as soft power in Europe is also given considerable attention.
A native New Yorker, Carter traveled south to compose the first quartet, staying in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona while on a Guggenheim Fellowship. But, as Emmery notes, it was hardly a monk-like existence, with Carter spending time with other artists, particularly visual artists, He traveled to Mexico to visit with the expat composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose sophisticated proportional deployment of rhythm encouraged Carter’s approach to polyrhythms and metric modulation in his own music. He even used a brief quotation from Nancarrow’s work in the quartet, as a tip of the hat. Emmery points out that this was hardly like the solitary creation myth that some of Carter’s supporters have portrayed.
In the 1950s, the composer Nicolas Nabokov was instrumental in promoting Carter’s music in Europe. At the time, Nabokov was Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, or CCF, which was backed by the CIA and aided in the presentation of American concert music. Today many people think of modernist music, if they think of it at all, as confrontational and its presentation, at best, discounting of audience reception. The US government promoted all kinds of American concert music, not just modernism, but composers like Carter were thought to represent the sophistication of Western music in the face of the hypernationalist jingoism of Eastern Bloc creators. For instance Shostakovich came in for particular criticism from Nabokov for caving in to Stalin and altering his compositional approach. Another facet to the European entanglements of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 is its winning of, and subsequent disqualification from, a string quartet composition competition in Liege, Belgium. It is a knotty tale, and Emmery does an excellent job disentangling its various threads.
How much Carter abetted the soft power stratagems is called into question. Emmery acknowledges that it is likely that the composer had some understanding of the reasons that his music was flourishing in part due to this type of promotion, but he didn’t do anything to prevent it from being used for political ends. That said, she doesn’t suggest that he was an activist for the Cold War cause either.
Carter may have taken until his forties to develop his distinctive mature style, but he continued to compose until after age 100. The premiere of String Quartet No. 1 proved to be the launchpad for Carter’s career ascent. Having dealt comprehensively with the musical elements of the quartet already, Emmery’s explication of extramusical factors that helped to support both its genesis and reception history is eloquent and clearly rendered. This book will likely be an eye-opener for anyone wanting to learn more about the crafting of Carter’s persona and modern music’s Cold War backstory.
The Pierre Boulez centennial year has seen a number of important concerts, publications, and recordings devoted to his music. Boulez (1925-2016) wrote three piano sonatas, which are considered important both in his catalog and in the avant-garde repertory. Contemporary music specialists tend to gravitate towards these totemic compositions – Idil Biret has recorded them for Naxos – but there are several other works for piano by Boulez, and they too are worthy of attention. Ralph van Raat has previously recorded for Naxos two selections by him, the early pieces Prelude, Toccata, and Scherzo and Douze Notations (both composed in 1945), the latter of which underwent expansions of some of its movements into pieces for orchestra.
Thème et variations pour la main gauche (“Theme and Variations for the Left Hand,” also from 1945) was written for Bernard Flavigny. Each of the variations is of a different character, and the virtuosity required to play them is substantial. Instead of the pointillism and counterpoint of Webern, who would soon become Boulez’s preferred composer among the early exponents of 12-tone music, the somewhat classicized deployment of the theme gives the piece a Schoenbergian cast. 3 Psalmodies, yet another piece from the watershed year 1945, owes a debt to Messiaen for its avian filigrees and additive rhythms. Compared to Boulez’s other early pieces, the psalmodies are expansive, adding up to nearly a half hour of music.
There are also two pieces from later in Boulez’s career. Fragment d’ une ébauche (1987), lives up to its title, being an aphoristic yet dense occasional piece, written in honor of Jean-Marie Lehn’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Lehn was a colleague of Boulez at the Collége de France, where the composer gave a series of lectures from 1975-1995.
The final piece on this CD, Incises (2001)is well-wrought and substantial in its own right, but it was taken as the starting point for a more elaborate ensemble composition, sur Incises. Indeed, the processes undertaken in the composition of Incises serve as a lynchpin for the materials deployed throughout many of Boulez’s later pieces. Rather than tone rows, intricate manipulation of pitch material based on hexachords (six-note collections) yields a variety of colorful gestures, many based on sonorous verticals, elaborate runs, and trills.
This is a particularly revealing recording that has been prepared with consummate care. Biret’s renditions of Boulez’s piano sonatas do Naxos proud, but a second installment of the pieces by van Raat would be a welcome addition to their catalog.
Carnegie Hall’s Arvo Pärt festival began with the Estonian Festival Orchestra, violin soloists Midori and Hans Christian Aavik and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. (Photo credit Fadi Kheir)
In listening to a three-hour concert of music by Arvo Pärt, the brilliance of the Estonian composer’s craft becomes clear. His use of percussion is a masterclass in orchestration, announcing the beginning of a piece with a chime, punctuating string passages with a ding or a gong, and clamorous timpani rolls in rare fortissimo moments.
This all-Pärt concert on October 23 was the first program in a season-long celebration of the 90-year old composer at Carnegie Hall. Pärt holds the Composer’s Chair at Carnegie this season (that’s the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair, to you). The occasion was also the American debut of the Estonian Festival Orchestra, founded in 2011 by Paavo Järvi, who conducted this performance.
Much of Pärt’s music is deceptively simple: descending scales, modest melodies repeated over and over, block chords and spare orchestration. He is a master of form as well, building a clear emotional arc in every composition, playing on extreme dynamic markings. This was deftly demonstrated by the Estonians, with pianissimo passages that were barely perceptible and subtle shades of softness, holding thunderous fortes for special moments. Another effective technique is his unabashed use of silence – in such a patient way that there is no compulsion to jump in and fill the void.
Only one work on this program reminded me why I have avoided listening to Pärt’s music for many years. The second movement of Tabula Rasa, one of the longest works on the program, was an exercise in restraint. Slow and repetitious without forward motion, it ultimately was tedious and boring. The way this music stopped time seemed to resonate with many in the audience, just not me. Besides that, the performance, which featured two violin soloists – veteran Midori and young upstart Hans Christian Aavik – was a remarkable and compelling work.
Some of the other works performed this evening surprised me with their varied sounds and compelling forward motion, both melodically and harmonically. This was not how I thought of Pärt’s compositional style.
The last piece on the program, Credo, was by far the most interesting and varied. Interspersing JS Bach’s Prelude No. 1 on solo piano (played by Nico Muhly) between Pärt-ian passages, some bellicose, some tender, was exciting.
The Estonians also brought along the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, who performed Adams Lament with the orchestra before being joined by the Trinity Choir for Credo. The combined choirs showed off their special sound in the encore, Pärt’s Estonian Lullaby.
WQXR-FM broadcast the concert on its Carnegie Hall Live series, and it is available for on demand listening at WQXR.org.
Carnegie Hall’s celebration of Arvo Pärt continues throughout the season. Upcoming events, beginning with tonight’s Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir are listed at this link.
The NY Philharmonic Celebrates Boulez’s Centenary
Works by Bartók, Boulez, Debussy, and Stravinsky
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
New York Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor
Saturday, October 4, 2025
Saturday, October 11, 2025
NEW YORK – In October, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the New York Philharmonic for two consecutive weeks. Both programs celebrated the centenary of the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), who was Music Director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971-1977. Boulez was a key figure of the post-WWII avant-garde and a proponent of serial music, then in its early stages. By the 1970s, Boulez was an internationally renowned conductor of a wide range of repertoire, and his time with the NY Phil was distinguished by a high level of music-making. Still, his advocacy for increasing the number of contemporary works presented was not welcome in all corners. Balancing the programming of repertory staples with that of twentieth and twenty-first century music remains a much-debated topic at the NY Phil, both within the organization and among its listeners. This is true of most American orchestras, and had more than a bit to do with Salonen’s recent decision to end his directorship of the San Francisco Symphony. Thus, it was heartening to see Boulez’s music received so well by the audiences at well-attended concerts on October 4th and 11th.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was the other composer on the first concert, and it was a simpatico pairing. Boulez admired Debussy and frequently performed his music. In the concert’s first half, works by the two composers alternated. Debussy was represented by movements from the orchestral version of Images, which shared a point of inception with the programmed Boulez pieces: they are transcriptions of piano pieces. In the 1940s, Boulez wrote twelve piano miniatures called Notations, each twelve measures long but varied in tempo and character to create a group of pieces that helped prove his avant-garde bona fides. In succeeding decades, Boulez returned to some of them and remade them for orchestra. Three of these, in both their original and orchestrated forms, were performed. Pierre-Laurent Aimard played the movements from Notations in authoritative fashion, scrupulously observing the tempos conceived for their solo renditions. Frequently the orchestral version has been written to be played a bit more slowly, for the purposes of resonance and ensemble coordination; the latter at times is formidably challenging. It is to the NY Phil’s credit that their playing took into account the disparate nature of all the music in the first half, rendering each inflection, some quite nuanced, with sensitivity. Salonen abetted this effort with a clear approach that embodied the scores in a manner not dissimilar to Boulez’s conducting style.
Aimard would later be the piano soloist in Fantasie, an infrequently performed early piece by Debussy, started during his Prix de Rome days and only published posthumously. It is not one of Debussy’s finest pieces, and its spate of revisions shows seams in a number of places, sounding like a grand tour of the stylistic evolution throughout his career. The piano part is virtuosic, sometimes stepping into the spotlight and at others blending in with the orchestra in a demonstration of esprit de corps. If anyone can make Fantasie at all compelling it is Aimard, who distinguished himself with fleet-fingered runs and thoughtful turns of phrase.
Debussy’s La Mer, his beloved orchestral work, was the program’s finale. Water’s motion, environs, and the denizens dependent upon it are frequent touchstones for the composer, nowhere more so than here, although the grotto scene from his opera Pelleas et Melisande is a strong contender. The piece has had a somewhat quixotic afterlife as a shorthand trope for the sea in many films, from documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters. The real thing still trumps all of them. The NY Philharmonic played it pristinely under Salonen’s direction.
Photo: Brandon Patoc.
The concert on October 11th featured two more composers in Boulez’s orbit: Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). The latter was represented by his Octet for Winds, a piece firmly rooted in the neoclassical tradition that pits a woodwind quartet of flute, clarinet, and two bassoons against two trumpets and two trombones. The music is filled with contrapuntal assertions and responses between winds and brass. This heterodox ensemble is difficult to balance and wasn’t perfect in this respect here, and the position of the group didn’t seem to be in an acoustically ideal spot onstage. Still, the interplay between performers was impressive.
Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is among the masterpieces of the past century. Like the octet, it is filled with counterpoint, including some of the fugal variety. Both Stravinsky and Bartók were able to navigate the delicate balance between music of the past and innovation. In addition to baroque music, Bartók references folk music from Eastern Europe. There is also a jocular trope on a theme by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), poking fun at his Russian counterpart for toeing the cultural lines drawn by Stalin. Not the first concerto for orchestra, in which each section gets an opportunity to be highlighted, it remains the best yet composed. The NY Phil, especially with the dynamic gestures of Salonen, played it like few other orchestras can dream to match.
In the performance’s second half, a more extensive work than Notations was presented. Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna was composed in 1975, while Boulez was still conducting the NY Phil. Maderna was a close associate, and his death from lung cancer at 53 was a difficult loss to contemplate. Although its use of gongs and chorale-like chords in the brass is evocative of ceremony, Rituel does not explicitly reference any religious traditions. Rather, it is a postmodern, secular type of valediction, in which spatial deployment envelops the audience in a solemn, eloquent meditation on grief. With a cohort onstage, other members of the orchestra were arrayed throughout the hall, their parts reverberating in well-coordinated fashion. There is a plethora of percussion instruments, with the players deployed in an additive fashion, with each of Rituel’s eight sections supplying more percussionists. This was also true of the other players in the other sections of the orchestra, supporting a long, powerful crescendo, one that then subsides in a gradual denouement.
The LA Dance Project was on hand for Rituel, performing onstage in front of, and sometimes between, members of the orchestra. It featured six dancers, two principals who wore black and four others in various shades of color. The choreography captured both fluid musical lines and percussive gestures, representing the stages of grief encountered after a loss in a dance that was modern in character and well-executed. Given Maderna’s death after an illness, the physicalization of violence, with both symbolic crucifixion and stabbing, seemed in places more like Sacre du Printemps than the demeanor of Rituel. Still, it added a layer of emotionality to a compelling use of the entirety of Geffen Hall. One hopes that more spatial music is on offer in the future, and that Salonen remains a frequent visitor to New York to perform with the orchestra.
“11,000 Strings” by Georg Friedrich Haas at Park Ave Armory in NYC (credit: Stephanie Berger)
At first glance, it seems like a stunt: 50 pianos and pianists, plus 25 other instrumentalists, all arranged in a circle around the perimeter of the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. They were there to perform 11,000 Strings, a 66 minute composition by Georg Friedrich Haas, commissioned and performed by the Austrian new music ensemble Klangforum Wien. Performances began September 30 and run through October 7, 2025 (I attended on October 2).
At the onset, I was ready to condemn this work as B.S., a party trick, but it’s definitely more than that. Each of the 50 pianos were tuned differently from one another, in 50 steps of microtones. The carefully constructed piece began quietly, on a major chord. One would think it would be difficult to create dynamics any softer than forte, but this performance exhibited a great range of dynamic and timbral nuances.
Almost from the start I recognized that this was a visceral experience for me, similar to the way out-of-tune chords can sometimes invoke a queasy feeling. But this was not nausea. Instead, it was a pleasant vibration deep in my chest, bringing a sense of anticipation and occasionally excitement.
The overall aural effect was cinematic and evoked visual images like a swarm of cicadas, the spookiness of a horror film, mysterious anticipation and thunderous cacophony. As the piece wore on, I caught a glimpse of the digital readout in front of one of the pianists: 21:38. I was discouraged to realize that it indicated 21 minutes elapsed, therefore 45 more to go. At that moment, I was ready for a coda, a fermata and a big finish.
The fact that the Armory could create so much buzz around this avant-garde novelty piece and attract thousands to come experience it is impressive. It does seem like a lot of effort for an hour of music. You won’t leave the venue humming a tune, that’s for sure. But the molecules in your body may be permanently rearranged.
Composer and vocalist Ken Ueno is a creator and performer of notated composition, sound art, and improvisation. A professor at UC Berkeley, Ueno’s singing involves extended techniques, with an investigation of throat-singing styles from many traditions being just one facet of them. His explorations have also often included using a megaphone.
The megaphone is not often thought of in musical contexts, but rather as an amplifier of spoken voices, often strident in demeanor and used for warning of danger, imposition of power, and inducing fear. Ueno’s employment of it in previous contexts turned these aims on their heads, serving as commentary on political subterfuge and decolonization. His latest work for voice and megaphone, Sonic Calligraphies, does this too, but in a more abstract fashion. In order to obtain certain frequencies, he modifies vowels to create expressive, but not directly linguistic, inflections.
Another partner in this endeavor is the recording venue, The Tank, a disused, large metal cistern in Rangely, Colorado. Converted from water container to performance venue, it has a one second delay and is extremely resonant. The inception of its use for performance was the iconic 1989 LP Deep Listening, made by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Panaiotis. Oliveros later repurposed the recording’s title as a manifesto for her discipline of sound studies. Like this trio, Ueno employs the resonance of the tank, exploring its high ceiling and spacious interior with detailed attention. His sonic palette is a panoply of overtones, microtones, multiphonics, and glissandos. They are deployed in everything from gentle forays to dramatic sonic maelstroms.
Facilitating this endeavor with a megaphone which, above all, is about messaging and overt declamation, makes its abstraction a virtue. The recording is a poetic rejoinder to the amplified discourse so often found today, emanating from the political talking heads on cable news, doom scrolls of social media, and animated disagreements in public and around the dinner table. Sonic Calligraphies may elude precise translation. However, it is eloquent and engaging in equal measure.
Composer Kati Agocs (photo courtesy Visconti Arts)
It’s rare for a new work to have even a second performance, but Kati Agócs’ Rapprochement received nine plays in a single day. Agócs was commissioned by the Banff International String Quartet Competition to write a composition that each quartet would be required to play in the 2025 competition.
The title of her nine-minute piece means “to bring together.” Agócs, in a pre-performance conversation with BISQC director Barry Shiffman, explained that it is in variation form, in which the harmonic underpinning is important to the melodic line. It’s a lyrical piece, and the instructions call for a lot of fluidity with beautiful solos for each member of the quartet. In an introductory video, she said, “The score leaves room for players to shape nuances of dynamics, articulation, balances, and color.” Agócs worked individually with the competing quartets as they learned the piece.
Quatuor Elmire (Photo by Rita Taylor, courtesy of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity)
There were nine quartets participating in 2025 BISQC: Viatores Quartet (from Berlin), Arete Quartet (Seoul), Cong Quartet (Hong Kong), Quatour Magenta (Paris), Quatour Elmire (Paris), Quartett HANA (Munich), Nerida Quartet (Bremen), Quartet KAIRI (Salzburg), and Poiesis Quartet (Cincinnati). Naturally, each gave its own spin on the work. This was a great opportunity for the audience to hear the ensembles back-to-back-to-back. Over the previous four days, the quartets performed one round of works from the romantic era and one round of a quartet by Franz Josef Haydn paired with a 21st century work. You can watch all of the performances on demand on the BISQC website.
I asked Shiffman why he chose to program all of the premiere performances of Agócs’ piece in a single concert. He said, “Look at the audience. It is the most popular concert of the competition.” He said that most of the audience are not avid new music listeners, and it’s helpful to them to hear many interpretations at the same time.
The Arete Quartet pulsated the rhythms as if inhaling and exhaling. Cong gave special attention to a steady eighth note all through the piece, which was one of the instructions in the score. Magenta leaned into the dissonances at the opening, and gave the rhythms a jaunty swing. Elmire made the most of the hemiola rhythms near the beginning and gave the jolly rhythms a sensual twist, ending with panache.
HANA did a great job of “singing” lyrically (another instruction in the score). Nerida gave the ethereal opening an especially mystical feel and their upward glissandos were especially gossamer. KAIRI seemed to have an especially good handle on the transitions between sections, and Poiesis showed a confidence above the others. They were especially birdlike in the chirps that came just before upward glissandos, and did a great job of varying the sound of each iteration of the theme.
Agócs, who is Canadian-American-Hungarian, teaches at New England Conservatory in Boston. She has written two other quartets, Tantric Variations for Cecilia Quartet and Imprimatur for Jupiter Quartet, both previous BISQC winners.
The first Banff International String Quartet Competition was in 1983 and it’s been held every three years since then. It takes place at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity which is in Banff National Park, a breathtakingly beautiful location in the Canadian Rockies. The winner of the 2025 competition will be announced on August 31.
