Apollo’s Music-for-the-Future Project on CD

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this month, Azica released the latest album of performances by the Apollo Chamber Players. This is a string quartet whose members are violinists Matthew J. Detrick and Anabel Ramirez Detrick, violist Whitney Bullock, and cellist Matthew Dudzik. The title of the album is With Malice Toward None, and the photograph of the Lincoln Memorial on the jacket cover clearly identifies the source for that title.

The title of the album is also the title of the opening track, a composition by J. Kimo Williams for electric violin and string quartet. The piece was dedicated to the late Civil Rights leader John Lewis, and the music amounts to a meditation on the legacies of both Abraham Lincoln following the end of the Civil War and Lewis’ mission throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The electric violin was played by Tracy Silverman. It was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, presumably after Apollo had recorded the quartet parts at The Clarion at Brazosport College (in Lake Jackson, Texas) on January 24 of this year. The track thus amounts to a first-rate example of how musicians can go about “getting things done,” even under the limitations of lockdown conditions. The music is definitely engaging, but I am not sure that such engagement is the result of the political inspiration for the score.

Most of the album serves to showcase the result of Apollo’s 20x2020 project. This project was launched in 2014 with the objective of commissioning twenty new multicultural works by the end of the decade. Readers based here in San Francisco will probably compare this effort with the Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire commissioning project, launched by the Kronos Quartet, which began during the 2015/2016 season in conjunction with the 125th anniversary celebration of Carnegie Hall.

The three commissioned works on the album, in order of composition, are as follows:

1. “What is the Word?,” inspired by the last poem written by Samuel Beckett (with the same title) and composed jointly by Christopher Theofanidis and Mark Wingate in 2017
2. “The Unraveling,” a four-movement suite by Pamela Z in 2019 with Z contributing both voice and electronics to the Apollo performance
3. “We Will Sing One Song,” written in 2020 by Eve Beglarian with additional parts for a second viola (Joan DerHovseplan) and assorted traditional Armenian instruments, played by Arsen Petrosyan and Pejman Hadadi, along with a digital track created by the composer

This makes for an impressive amount of diversity, even if any connection to the overall album title is not particularly clear. More logic can be found in the decision to precede Beglarian’s composition with three Armenian folksongs collected through the ethnomusicological research by the Armenian priest Komitas. Ironically, Beglarian’s score has as much to do with Stephen Foster’s “Old Kentucky Home” as it does with any Armenian sources, providing a somewhat ironic reflection on the album title.

Personally, I came away from this album with the uneasy feeling that too much was being unloaded on me over the course of roughly an hour and ten minutes. However, in this “digital age” it is much easier to listen to the works one at a time than it was when they were crammed together on two sides of a vinyl disc. As a result, I would advocate listening to Beglarian’s composition in the context of the Armenian folksongs that precede it on the album, while anything involving Beckett is best examined in isolation.