Last night One Found Sound (OFS) hosted a ‘virtual watch party,” revisiting the two nights of “live” performances presented at The Midway almost exactly a month ago. This was part of a schedule The Midway had prepared of “outdoor and distanced dining experiences with music and arts from local artists and beyond;” and, from time to time, the camera shifted from the musicians on stage to the audience members enjoying their “distanced dining experiences.” (One was also aware of the audience through their enthusiastic responses to the performances.)
Annamarie Aria, Kashi Elliott, James Jaffe, and Christina Simpson performing at The Midway (screen shot courtesy of OFS)
The entire program was performed by the string quartet of OFS members Annamarie Arai and Kashi Elliott on violins (and sharing the leading part), Christina Simpson on viola, and James Jaffe on cello. The title of the program was STRUM, which was also the title of the final work on the program, a single-movement composition by the contemporary African American composer Jessie Montgomery. Her work was complemented at the beginning of the program by the leading female African American composer of the previous century, Florence Price. She was represented by a relatively early two-movement string quartet in G major, probably composed in 1929. Between these two works the quartet played the third of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 59 (“Razumovsky”) quartets, written in the key of C major.
As the title suggests, Montgomery composed “Strum” to explore the variety of different ways in which instruments of the string family can produce sounds. Strumming clearly received considerable attention; but, ultimately, the single movement was a celebration of the diversity of sonorities. Price’s quartet, on the other hand, was based on more conventional performance techniques. The structural foundation tends to honor nineteenth-century traditions; but the prevailing rhetoric, with its occasional intimations of folk sources, definitely reflects the composer’s African American identity.
In such a context the Beethoven quartet made for a somewhat curious “spacer” between the works of these two much later African American composers. Nevertheless, we are now less than a month away from the celebration of that composer’s 250th birthday; so the selection was hardly inappropriate! The three Opus 59 quartets were composed for Count Andrey Razumovsky, who commissioned Beethoven during his tenure as the Russian ambassador in Vienna. The first two quartets appropriate Russian themes, which are explicitly identified in the score; but no such identification can be found for the C major quartet. In introducing the work, Jaffe reinforced the opinion that the melancholic rhetoric of the second movement (Andante con moto quasi allegretto in A minor) might have reflected a Russian spirit; but the use of the augmented second in the theme could just as easily have been a Hungarian reference! More important is that the quartet players gave a vigorous account of the entire score, reflecting the wide breadth of emotional dispositions that Beethoven had captured, laced with more than a few instances of his prodigious capacity for wit.
As was the case with the Midway video for the last “virtual watch party,” the camera work tended to enhance the listening experience, tracking the contributions of all four players both individually and in the various combinations that they formed.
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