JACK Quartet Revisits John Luther Adams CDs

JACK Quartet members Austin Wulliman, Jay Campbell, John Pickford Richards, and Christopher Otto (photograph by Shervin Lainez, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the JACK Quartet returned to San Francisco Performances with its first Shenson Chamber Series performance. This followed two appearances in the PIVOT series, the first in March of 2016 and the second in April of 2021, which, due to COVID, was a streamed presentation. The quartet members are violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, sharing the position of first chair, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell.

The program consisted entirely of compositions by John Luther Adams that they had previously recorded for Cold Blue Music. The earliest of those recordings accounted for the concluding work on last night’s program, “The Wind in High Places.” The more recent recording coupled “Lines Made by Walking” with untouched. The program began with the “Rising” movement from untouched, followed by the “three-movement journey” of “Lines Made by Walking.”

All three of these selections presented Adams’ passionately informed interest in sonorities, particularly those that can be traced back to “natural” sources. This made “Rising” an apposite approach to beginning the entire program. Simply put, the composition evoked the synthesis of bell-like sonorities using only the auditory qualities of the four string quartet instruments. This requires skilled musicianship on the part of the JACK players, but it also presented Adams’ deep understanding of the spectral qualities of the underlying sounds.

However, beyond the nature of the sounds themselves, Adams developed his own approach to progression, departing entirely from anything taught to music students about harmonic progressions. Indeed, it would be fair to say that, taken as a whole, “Lines Made by Walking” is a single progression in three movements. First it ascends a mountain, then it follows a ridge at the height it had achieved, after which it follows a path of descent. What makes the entire composition so engaging is that this “journey” unfolds entirely through the progression of sonorities that depart entirely from the rhetoric of harmony.

That sense of journey is equally evident in “The Wind in High Places.” Each of the three movements establishes its own “high place.” This is made explicit through the titles assigned to the movements:

1. Above Sunset Pass
2. MacLaren Summit
3. Looking Toward Hope

Admittedly, those unfamiliar with Alaskan geography may not “get the message” of these titles. However, after having experienced “Lines Made by Walking,” the attentive listener can easily apprehend the same sense of journey in “The Wind in High Places,” even if the specific locations are unfamiliar.

The JACK Quartet has championed Adams’ string quartet repertoire for quite some time, and it was a thorough delight to experience in performance what had previously been available only on recordings.