‘This album is not funny,’ writes Spektral Quartet viola player Doyle Armbrust in his booklet-note about the quartet’s very not-funny new release of music by Sky Maeklay, David Reminick and Chris Fisher-Lochhead, with Haydn plopped down surreally in their midst. The resulting geeky, highly interactive, creative and collaborative fun and games drenched in pop culture are, as advertised, unlike anything its intended audience - or anyone else - has ever heard.
Humour in music can be in short supply but the Spektral Quartet did its best to remedy that in an upbeat evening celebrating its recent CD release. Cellist Russell Rolen introduced Sky Macklay’s Many Many Cadences: (2014), grinningly referring to it as ‘sadistic’. Macklay’s dazzling exercise sounds as if she collected the endings to dozens of works and then grafted them together in a series of descending scales. If it is sadistic for the musicians, it is sheer pleasure for listeners, especially with the Spektral players’ ear-tickling precision.
"Things have already fallen apart at the outset of Beat Furrer’s String Quartet No. 3; the center has given way to a marginal babel: scrapes, scratches, plucks. On Sunday at the Goethe-Institut, the superb Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, making its Boston debut, took on Furrer’s challenge of reassembling such halting signals into coherence — while still, in its playing and programming, drawing out the equivocality of Furrer’s undertaking: striving toward communication, uncertain of the possibility."
"The front cover of “Serious Business,” the Spektral Quartet’s new album, shows three members — violinists Austin Wulliman and Clara Lyon, and cellist Russell Rolen — walking toward the camera, earnest looks on their faces, while the fourth, violist Doyle Armbrust, is falling helplessly on his behind. On the back cover, Armbrust is seen writhing in pain while the other three are shown in poses of desolation and mourning — for his viola.
It’s the perfect advertisement for an album whose works incorporate humor, in wildly disparate ways, into the often severe matter of contemporary music. The photos also say something important about Spektral’s talented and ambitious musicians: serious about the music, not about themselves."
"...All were formidable, none more so than the Spektral Quartet’s free Sunday afternoon show at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago. The foursome of Austin Wulliman, Clara Lyon, Doyle Armbrust and Russell Rolen focuses on new music, but isn’t beholden to it. Their latest, chirpy release on the Sono Luminus label, “Serious Business,” quizzically looks at musical humor through three works from the last two years, and a fourth by an up-and-comer named Franz Josef Haydn.
Straiter laces prevailed here for an engrossing program, “Prismatic Memory.” The quartet proved that they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily; a capacity to make complicated music clear; and, most notably on this occasion, an ability to cast a magic spell of silence over a restless, gallery-going audience.
The first potion was the premiere of “Bagatellen” (2015) by Hans Thomalla, who teaches at Northwestern University. In the third of nine tight, hushed miniatures, a trill was stretched out, slowly obliterated; in the fourth, a chorale became immobile, yet still comprehensible; the last was a brushing arioso, bowed on the instruments’ bodies, necks and tuning pegs.
The players brought a similarly un-self-conscious approach to the extended techniques in Beat Furrer’s String Quartet No. 3 (2004), an enveloping, bona fide masterpiece that stretches over 50 uninterrupted minutes. For some reason, the reputation of the Swiss-born Mr. Furrer has not properly crossed the Atlantic. It should..."
In Medieval times musicians were essentially court jesters—entertainers who performed music, told jokes, and did tricks to entertain the nobility or to make money at fairs and markets. But somewhere along the long and winding road of the Western music tradition, music became much more serious.
Fast forward to the 21st century, where opera houses and concert halls protect and preserve a canon of “serious” classical works. Audience members dress in suits and gowns, sit quietly in their seats, read expertly-crafted program notes, stick their noses in the air and, most importantly, never clap between movements.
Or at least, that’s how it feels sometimes. But the Spektral Quartet is here to dispel that classical concert-going stereotype and inject a little much-needed comic relief into the classical music realm.
Spektral’s new album, titled “Serious Business,” is anything but serious. The album comprises four different perspectives on humor through the lens of classical music, featuring three new works by living composers and one classic from that late, great father of the string quartet, Joseph Haydn.
Perhaps the funniest few seconds of "Serious Business," the new recording by Chicago's cutting-edge Spektral Quartet, is the entry of Franz Joseph Haydn's well-mannered String Quartet No. 2 (Opus 33) on the heels of David Reminick's decidedly ill-mannered "The Ancestral Mousetrap" (2014), in which the instrumentalists play and sing (sometimes in four-part harmony) an absurdist-macabre text by Russell Edson.
"Mobile Miniatures illustrates one of Spektral Quartet's most appealing and significant qualities. Though violinists Austin Wulliman and Clara Lyon, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen are all adventurous, unimpeachable musicians, that's basically standard equipment in contemporary classical ensembles today—what sets them apart is their willingness to meet their audience halfway. They don't water down their repertoire, but they're happy to share what it is they love about the work they play—and they consistently find new ways to make their concerts fun, engaging, and serious all at once."
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But for all the easy delight these works afford the listener, they are from a compositional and performance standpoint works of great difficulty. Many Many Cadences is a brain-frying overload of musical information, the level of sheer musical skill required to execute The Ancestral Mousetrap effectively is monumental, Hack would be a nuanced, well-structured piece even if it weren't also an illuminating essay on the music of American speech, and the composer of "The Joke" has some serious chops, too.
This is repertoire that makes serious demands on the performer, and offers serious rewards for the listener. It just happens to be a lot of fun to listen to, as well.
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That said, there is no finer string quartet in Chicago than Spektral Quartet. With the superb violinist Lyon joining Spektral a year ago (replacing Aurelien Pederzoli), the group seems to be playing with even greater intensity, cohesion and flexibility. And, as Saturday’s concert demonstrated, while many celebrated new-music ensembles necessarily perform a great deal of not-so-good music, Spektral’s batting average is consistently high, displaying an adroit selection of young and contemporary composers.
That Clara Lyon is a strong addition to an already imposing lineup was evident in the opening performance of Schubert’s Quartetsatz. In the first violin part, she led her colleagues in this taut single movement with a bold yet sweet tone that conveyed Schubert’s gracious lyricism as much as the biting drama, backed by pinpoint articulation and alert ensemble.
Ryan Ingebritsen’s “3 Birds” section from his 4×4 proved especially rewarding. With the composer working the laptop, all four players were amplified, each spread out to the corners of the audience. The viola begins a solo line of bowed long notes, which eventually passes to each violin in turn, then the cello. Spacious yet concentrated, the music grows in amplified, slightly distorted volume as the individual string lines slowly rise, fall and coalesce. There is a haunting quality to this unsettling music with a ghostly wail-like expression, followed by hard pizzicatos and a highly rhythmic section. Ingebritsen’s stark yet compelling music was given first-class advocacy and played with the utmost concentration by the Spektral Quartet members.
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"First it was brusque, then eerie and sly. Julia Holter and the Spektral Quartet shared the Ecstatic Music Festival concert on Wednesday night at Merkin Concert Hall in a program that lingered in the cloudy zone where contemporary composition meets the pop song. In its sources and allusions, the concert took for granted the broad-spectrum musical erudition of current composers: hip-hop, medieval motets, Broadway, Impressionism, dubstep.
Playing on its own, Spektral — a string quartet from Chicago — brought one piece, Liza White’s “Zin zin zin zin,” that got its title and its rhythmic thrust from a rap by Mos Def, and another, by Chris Fisher-Lochhead, that radically rearranged a moody electronic lament by James Blake, “I Never Learnt to Share,” along with Stravinsky’s “Concertino” from 1920. There was also Dave Reminick’s “Oh My God, I’ll Never Get Home,” which had the quartet singing a poem by Russell Edson about a man falling to pieces as he walks, with heaving music to match.
Each piece was introduced, with an explanation, by a quartet member; the violinist Clara Lyon smiled as she praised the “weird things happening” in “Concertino.” The pieces had a shared palette: dissonant and clenched, with fleeting moments of delicacy giving way to more tension. The quartet played attentively, poised or just harsh enough, savoring the suspense; none of the new pieces overstayed. They were confident miniatures, rich in implications."
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“First it was brusque, then eerie and sly. Julia Holter and the Spektral Quartet shared the Ecstatic Music Festival concert on Wednesday night at Merkin Concert Hall in a program that lingered in the cloudy zone where contemporary composition meets the pop song. In its sources and allusions, the concert took for granted the broad-spectrum musical erudition of current composers: hip-hop, medieval motets, Broadway, Impressionism, dubstep…
Ms. Holter and the quartet also performed Alex Temple’s song cycle “Behind the Wallpaper,” which, Ms. Temple has said, includes Ms. Holter’s music among its inspirations. The lyrics of the brief songs in “Behind the Wallpaper” sketch surreal transformations and spooky situations: a character who has been swallowing seawater and live fish, another wandering a house where the walls keep shifting. The songs were atmospheric with ambiguous tonality, drawing chuckles along with hushed curiosity. They quivered, hovered, paused and slipped in and out of ghostly waltzes before the last one, “Spires,” resolved into the sweet major chords of an old movie score’s happy ending, followed by the sound of rising waves — a flood, perhaps, drowning all the strangeness.”
“Both the title and subject matter seemed to reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Though Temple’s character is not confined to one room, her odd visions signify the same descent into psychosis brought on by a life of mendacity. Holter’s exaggerated, elongated syllables and measured, bouncy tempo were more reminiscent of Björk’s timbre than Holter’s often more ethereal overtones. But the feeling of disorientation and displacement is one that Holter has previously examined, most notably on her 2013 LP, Loud City Song. ThoughLoud City takes an approach based more deeply in reality, “Behind the Wallpaper” felt like an exploration of a different side of the same spinning coin, a dizzying collage of dreamlike impressions cleverly obscuring a straightforward narrative.
While at times it was difficult to get a firm grasp on “Wallpaper,” there was also a sense that Temple wanted it that way — somewhere between avant-garde composition, mysterious artifact, and sci-fi thriller. Even at a time when genre tends to blur and bend, it’s still rare to see performances as unique and risky as this, and the combo of Holter’s bewitching vocal delivery and Spektral Quartet’s spirited strings provided an especially stirring showcase for the work. We have Ecstatic Music Festival to thank for that, at least in part. With upcoming pairings from ETHEL with Kaki King and John King, Xiu Xiu with Mantra Percussion, an 80th birthday celebration for Terry Riley, and a handful of others, there’s no shortage of distinctive, idiosyncratic events to give music fans plenty to feel ecstatic about.”
