The Sydney Art Quartet was founded in 2015 by artist director James Beck. The raison d’etre of the virtuosic quartet is to “playfully sidestep routine, cliché & orthodoxy” In 2019 it embarked on several new partnerships, one being with Emanuel Synagogue to present concerts that “intrigue and indulge”. This recent programme certainly lived up to that promise. The quarter comprises: James Beck– cello, Andrew Jezek– viola, Veronique Serret & Anna Albert– violin.
The American composer Steve Reich (b. 1936) has been a leading composer of minimalism since the mid 1960s. He continues to expand his compositional resources to achieve striking expressiveness in his vocal pieces. His music, although very complex, is completely accessible.
Reich was the creator of “phase” and “pulse” music, both of which rely on the gradual alteration of repetitive rhythmic patterns to create subtle changes in musical texture. Concerned with the manipulation of aural perception, he directs the listener to focus on one of the many rhythmic patterns occurring concurrently in his music by reinforcing one pattern through changes in dynamics and timbre. Although he was responsible for the invention of the “phase-shifting pulse gate,” a device used to aid performers in measuring minute rhythmic changes, Reich avoids the use of electronic instruments in performance. Most of his pieces feature large percussion ensembles with the addition of standard concert string and wind instruments and voice. His later compositions require full orchestras and large vocal ensembles.
The transformation of human speech into music shaped his work in the late 1980s and 1990s. For Different Trains (1988) he recorded the voices of Holocaust survivors, transcribed the most melodious phrases into musical motation, and developed the entire musical structure from this. In performance the taped voices stored in a sampling keyboard enable them to be precisely integrated with the live musicians. For this presentation the pre-recorded string octet and amplified live string was accompanied by cinema installations by Gabriela Sá and Mariana Garcia – commissioned in 2016 in honour of Reich’s 80th birthday.
The second offering of the evening was Nigel Westlake and Lior Attar’s Sim Shalom (Hebrew: שִׂים שָׁלוֹם; “Grant Peace”) is a blessing that is recited at the end of the morning Amidah in the Ashkenazic tradition. An excerpt from a larger song cycle called Compassion we were entranced by the chanting voice of Avital Greenberg & the skilled string quartet. The complete work is a collaboration between the Australian artists Westlake (b 1958) the renowned musician and conductor, and Attar (b.1976), aka Lior, the Melburnian independent singer-songwriter.
Subtitled “let’s not make a song and dance about this” Michael Nyman’s String Quartet #5 came 16 years after #1-4 (1985-95). Intentionally ironic it has exuberant dancelike patterns that animate the first and fifth movements, while the lyrical, songlike second and fifth hint at the ‘Franklyn’ theme from the composer’s bittersweet soundtrack to Michael Winterbottom’s 1999 film Wonderland. A film and score everyone should experience.The gap in his string quartet cycle coincides chiefly with his concentration on and flourishment with his greatest film scores.
It was the inclusion of Nyman (b. 1944) on the program that drew me to this concert along with the rare opportunity to visit the Emanuel Synagogue. Although the seating pattern did not allow for us all the fully view the choreography by Anton (dancer: Kristie Pike), the room’s westerly aspect captures the setting sun and floods it with golden natural light making this an unforgettable event on a balmy early summer’s night. Added to that, the marvelously abundant hospitality was willingly embraced by one and all.
Mark G Nagle – On Sounds
