A Curious Blend of Czech and Hungarian

courtesy of Jensen Artists

A little over a month ago ECM New Series released its first album of the Parker Quartet. This group consists of violinists Daniel Chong and Ken Hamao, violist Jessica Bodner, and cellist Kee-Hyun Kim. They are Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University, and the group is now in its seventh year as faculty members in the Department of Music.

The “program” for the album was conceived as one of powerful contrasts. The “center” of the three selections is the Opus 97 string quintet in E-flat major by Antonín Dvořák. It is “flanked on either side” by works for string quartet composed by György Kurtág, both of which reflect the composer’s rhetoric of minimalism. The opening selection is the Opus 44 collection of six short pieces entitled Moments Musicaux. The Dvořák quintet is then followed by a series of fifteen even shorter pieces collected under the title Officium Breve in Memoriam Andreae Szervánszky, Kurtág’s Opus 28.

The recording of the quintet also includes violist Kim Kashkashian. Kashkashian is probably familiar to those interested in the ECM New Series repertoire. In 2013 she won a Grammy Award for the album Music for Viola, which showcased music by both Kurtág and György Ligeti. She introduced the Parker to Kurtág’s Opus 44. They performed it for the first time in 2005; and, since then, they have played it more than any other composition in their repertoire.

Through my many encounters with concerts produced by San Francisco Performances, I found myself hooked on Kurtág long before I started writing about music as my “retirement gig.” Indeed, I used my tenure with Examiner.com to do all I could to put out the word about both recordings and concert performances of Kurtág’s music. I have long delighted in the sense of play that he brings to his compositions. In that context I would say that his rhetorical stance differs significantly from that of Dvořák’s chamber music. On the other hand, when one homes in on the details of Kurtág’s miniatures and the way in which he juxtaposes them, I would conjecture that his “sense of play” owes much to a rhetoric of sharp contrasts, even in a sequence of those miniatures.

In other words the contrast of the Opus 97 quintet with both of the Kurtág selections amounts to “distinctions in the large” that complement the “distinctions in the small” that one encounters in those two Kurtág collections. Whether the Parker musicians (or, for that matter, Kashkashian) would agree with my conjecture does not matter very much to me. The mind of the attentive listener finds its own way through any sequence of compositions that it confronts, and even stumbling along the way can be part of the listening experience. I may not yet have adjusted to the “big picture” of Parker’s new ECM release, but it is certainly an album that deserves multiple listening experiences.