Contrast will be a theme in the first concert of the Friends of Chamber Music season. Who better to present contrast than the Pacifica Quartet? They epitomize the agility, the range of tonal color, and the bold sense of experiment that Alex Ross meant when he wrote in The New Yorker that the string quartet is “a kind of all-terrain vehicle in contemporary culture.” The Pacifica offers to take us from the original voicing of Samuel Barber’s Adagio through the delights and profundities of Beethoven’s Op. 130 and deliver us into our present crux of social inequality.
The quartet asked James Lee, III, pronounced “James Lee Three,” to write a quartet that will focus its audience on the alarming fact of child hunger in our midst. He did just that, using text by the poet Sylvia Dianne Beverly and writing parts that will be sung by members of the Colorado Children’s Chorale. The concert on September 7 will include the world premiere live performance of the work. Note that Cedille Records, the audiophile non-profit Chicago company founded by James Ginsburg, son of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has recorded the work on the album American Voices by the Pacifica Quartet.
The concert will close with Beethoven’s Op. 130 String Quartet, including the Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, originally composed as the Op. 130 finale (the word “fuge” is the German spelling of “fugue”). If you actually like to listen to the Grosse Fuge, you have earned bragging rights. I’m not quite there yet, myself. It still sounds like bumblebees in a bottle, although it helps to know that the fugue brings together key parts of all the previous movements of Beethoven’s Op. 130 String Quartet. Still, the fugue form creates a swarm of themes that collide and sting before resolving into unexpected beauty. I can understand why Beethoven’s publisher made him write a kinder, gentler final movement. Good luck. Bring an epi pen. And remember that Stravinsky called the Grosse Fuge music “that will be contemporary forever.”
It will be a concert to remember.
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