Del Sol String Quartet Takes on Eastman

Del Sol String Quartet members Sam Weiser, Benjamin Kreith, Kathryn Bates, and Charlton Lee (from their Old First Concerts event page)

Yesterday afternoon Old First Concerts presented its final program for the month of September. The performers were the members of the Del Sol String Quartet, violinists Sam Weiser and Benjamin Kreith, who alternated in playing first violin, violist Charlton Lee, and cellist Kathryn Bates. The program began with three short pieces, all of which had been premiered by Del Sol. These were followed by a half-hour performance of Julius Eastman’s “Gay Guerrilla.” Like all of this month’s programs, the performance was live-streamed through YouTube and recorded for subsequent viewing on a YouTube Web page.

Eastman is one of the lesser known of the adventurous composers whose reputations ascended during the third quarter of the twentieth century. During his time in Buffalo, New York, his colleagues included Morton Feldman and Lukas Foss. (This would also have been the time when Michael Tilson Thomas was conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.)

“Gay Guerrilla” was composed in 1979 and shows awareness of recent achievements in adventurous repertoire. Terry Riley had composed “In C” in 1964, Philip Glass’ first opera, Einstein on the Beach, had been premiered in July of 1976, and Steve Reich had advanced from working with tape loops (with Riley as a colleague at the San Francisco Tape Music Center) to instrumental compositions. In that context “Gay Guerrilla” is a lush tapestry of repetitive structures.

Curiously, Eastman never specified instrumentation for this composition. The first recorded performance involved four pianos, and regular readers probably know by now that San Francisco Contemporary Music Players will present a two-piano performance by Kate Campbell and Allegra Chapman this coming October 16. The Del Sol players were coached by Luciano Chessa, who has become a strong advocate of Eastman’s music; and, under his guidance, they prepared a performance for three string quartets, two of which were prerecorded.

While the live-stream of this performance was thoroughly engaging, this was definitely a presentation that would have benefitted from physical presence. It was easy enough to associate specific motifs with the bowing patters of the individual performers. However, limitations of audio capture technology made it difficult to establish how with each of the recorded instrumental lines contributed to the whole. Around the time that many listeners may have felt that Eastman’s repetitive rhetoric had reached its limit, he began to insert fragments from the Lutheran hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” just to make sure listeners were still paying attention.

Each of the opening selections could be taken as a “warm-up exercise” in attentive listening. Rajna Swaminathan’s “Borne” was a fascinating exercise in endowing what might be called “Western practices” with an “Indian accent,” evident more through subtle phrasing than thematic content. Erika Oba’s “Halcyon” is named for the “Halcyon Commons” in South Berkeley and amounts to a study in serenity that never devolves into the mawkish. There is also a suggestion of serenity in Jonah Gallagher’s “Ghosts of Grass,” which turns out to be a reflection on bluegrass fiddle techniques of past centuries.

The entire program lasted almost exactly one hour in duration; and, at the end of the journey, the attentive listener had no cause to complain about too much or too little.