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Innovations in strings

The Penderecki Quartet boldly explores new musical frontiers
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
November 14th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The quartet hopes to tap Janáček's spirit in Prague.
Penderecki String Quartet

When: Sunday, Nov. 18, at 7
Where: Roxy NoD
Tickets: 200 Kč, available at the venue

Whether performing Brahms at St. Petersburg’s opulent Sheremetiev Palace, or premiering the works of renegade Canadian composers in the Yukon’s rustic Dawson City, the Penderecki Quartet’s work remains worthy of its namesake, the great Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.
For many, serious music of the past century evokes images of John Cage tossing I-Ching sticks for musical clues, or the distinct minimalist signature of Phillip Glass. Starting in the late 1950s, Penderecki pursed a musical track that was at least as a daring and in many ways more effective than Cage or Glass. In 1960, his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was as boldly topical as it was musically profound. In 1987, Threnody was still moving critics like the New York Times’ John Rockwell to say, “The shivering glissandos and wailing bands of sound (literally represented in the score as thick horizontal lines across the staves) made powerful sense in the abstract and also evoked terror and destruction.”
“Penderecki’s maverick and innovative musical exploration is a fever the Penderecki Quartet embodies,” quartet violinist Jeremy Bell says via e-mail from Ontario, Canada, where the group is currently based. Founded in 1986 by Polish students in Kotowice, the quartet so impressed Penderecki that he agreed to lend it his name.  
Speaking of the group’s ongoing musical vision, Bell says, “Our mandate is to play a wide range of repertoire and explore new vistas for the string quartet. This attitude has led us to perform with such diverse artists as Cuban pianist Hilario Durán, pipa virtuoso Ching Wong and later this season with New York’s well-known DJ Spooky.”
Such wide stylistic sweeps are fashionable nowadays, but one thing the PSQ brings to the stage is an uncompromising approach to strings that continuously points back to Penderecki. Illustrating such bandwidth, Bell recalls, “Penderecki once sent his score for his first string quartet to a competition in the West, and it was stopped at the border because they suspected it of being encoded military plans.”
Puzzled border guards aside, among the secrets encrypted in Penderski’s work is his tempering of the avant-garde with romanticism while driving a crucial extension of the vocabulary of strings. Such grace can be heard on the PSQ’s 2006 CD release of Bartók Quartets (on Canada’s Electra label), which has rightfully gained the ensemble kudos from leading critics on both sides of the Atlantic. A later 2006 release, String Theory/Theorie des cordes, offers a refreshing hint of sub-artic space with the group championing the cause of contemporary Canadian composers.
Continuing that thread, the quartet’s upcoming Roxy NoD concert will feature Canada’s emerging generation of adventurous composers. Included on the program is the work of electronic composer Omar Daniel, who will also be performing with the group.
Daniel’s composition Annunciation has a multimedia aspect. “The Annunciation takes its inspiration from seven Italian Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation of Christ that will be projected during the performance,” Bell explains. Other works on the program include “a Laurie Radford composition inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity; Alice Ho’s highly energetic work that holds resemblance to Bartók; Chinese traditional music; and Piotr Grella Mozejko’s 15-minute homo-rhythmic bombastic punch in the face outburst of anger toward the current despotic leaders who cause the suffering of innocent victims.”
The PSQ may be showcasing exciting directions in new music on this tour, but it has not forgotten its Central European roots. The quartet was recently commissioned to record Leoš Janáček’s two string quartets. “We are hoping to use our time in Prague to get as close as possible to this mysterious composer, and also try to bring a whiff of his spirit back to Canada,” Bell says.
Helping to summon that spirit will be Prague’s own MoEns ensemble, closing Sunday’s concert with works by contemporary Czech composers.

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (14/11/2007):

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