Chicago Reader: Spektral Quartet give the local premiere of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet no. 2, all six hours of it

Chicago Reader: Spektral Quartet give the local premiere of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet no. 2, all six hours of it

The music is exquisitely quiet, so while string players don’t have to exert great pressure on their instruments, they hold their bows for what must feel like an eternity during long tones, which are only occasionally interrupted by pizzicato plucks. With recently enlisted violinist Maeve Feinberg joining Doyle Armbrust, Russell Rolen, and Clara Lyon, Chicago’s Spektral Quartet will provide the long overdue local premiere of the quartet in conjunction with the current Merce Cunningham exhibition “Common Time” (Feldman was one of many brilliant 20th-century composers who collaborated with the choreographer).

Chicago Tribune: Howard Reich's best jazz performances of 2016

(photo: Brian Jackson for Chicago Tribune)

(photo: Brian Jackson for Chicago Tribune)

Miguel Zenon and the Spektral Quartet at Logan Center, Sept. 24: 
The 10th Hyde Park Jazz Festival featured several memorable events, but one stood out: the world premiere of Zenon's "Yo Soy La Tradicion" ("I Am Tradition"), a tour de force of composition, performance and improvisation. Zenon's score was packed with remarkably complex string writing for Chicago's Spektral Quartet, the musicians finessing it all, while Zenon offered freewheeling phrasemaking one moment, carefully scored lines the next.

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- Howard Reich

 

Chicago Tribune: Weekend Ear Taxi Festival events include several winning premieres

(photo: Patrick Gorski)

(photo: Patrick Gorski)

"The work whetted one's ears for one of Thomas' own pieces, "Selene (Moon Chariot Rituals)," a Tanglewood Festival-Third Coast co-commission receiving its Chicago premiere. The impetus of dance is never far from the surface of this exhilarating score, which melds the complementary natures of a percussion quartet and a string quartet to produce a study in inexorable rhythmic dynamism. One of Gusty Thomas' most inventive creations, it drew a supercharged performance from the combined forces of Third Coast and Spektral."

"The Friday evening concert held six world premieres shared by the Spektral Quartet and Ensemble Dal Niente.

A broken cello string early in the performance of George Lewis' String Quartet 1.5: "Experiments in Living" forced the string players to take it again from the top, giving listeners roughly one and a half hearings of the explosive lexicon of noises by the longtime member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Leaner of texture and much more introverted of expression was a movement from a string-quartet-in-progress by Chicago Symphony Orchestra resident composer Samuel Adams. Snare drums activated by tranducer speakers lent otherworldly rattles to extremely delicate string writing that suffered for lack of a larger musical context.

One had no problem connecting at once with "Prospective Dwellers" by cellist and composer Tomeka Reid, an active presence on the local jazz scene. Jazz-inflected musings and quasi-pop harmonies gave her piece its easy, good-natured appeal. It and its companion pieces elicited incisive readings from the amazing Spektral foursome."

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Chicago Tribune: Hyde Park Jazz Festival review - Music embraces a neighborhood

(photo: Brian Jackson for Chicago Tribune)

(photo: Brian Jackson for Chicago Tribune)

The centerpiece of the festival brings a capacity audience to a hush for the world premiere of Zenon's "Yo Soy La Tradicion" ("I Am Tradition"). Commissioned for the occasion by the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the piece elegantly blurs distinctions among jazz, classical and folkloric music. Substantive yet accessible, rhythmically intense but often melodically soaring, "Yo Soy La Tradicion" shows Zenon — as in previous work — finding inspiration in the musical, cultural and religious rituals of his native Puerto Rico. Yet this is no kitschy appropriation of familiar dance forms. Instead, Zenon has crafted a vast work in which meter, tempo, texture and instrumental technique are in constant flux. Certain passages bristle with complex interactions between Zenon and the Spektral Quartet. Others prove disarmingly direct by virtue of their poetic melodies or buoyant rhythms or extended passages of hand claps for all the musicians. Zenon has built forward motion into the string writing so deftly that you never really miss the rhythm-section accompaniment that typically drives small-ensemble jazz. It's a major work that ought to be recorded, and Zenon should enter it for the Pulitzer Prize music competition.

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Strad Magazine: The Spektral’s exploration of musical humour is no laughing matter

Strad Magazine: The Spektral’s exploration of musical humour is no laughing matter

Serious Business, the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet knowingly calls its collection of four pieces exploring humour in music. And there’s no question of the foursome taking any of this music lightly: these are superb performances, vivid and strongly felt, convincingly argued and full of rich, characterful detail.

Gramophone: 'Serious Business'

Gramophone: 'Serious Business'

‘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.

Strad Magazine: Review - Spektral Quartet - SubCulture

Strad Magazine: Review - Spektral Quartet - SubCulture

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.

Washington Post: No quarter from the Spektral Quartet

Washington Post: No quarter from the Spektral Quartet

That the quartet (joined at times by flutist Claire Chase) handled all the slithering, dodging, sputtering and explosiveness thrown its way with such aplomb was impressive. They are a marvelous foursome, and made most of the hurdles in their path sound easily surmountable — sometimes even fun.

Boston Globe: Spektral Quartet at Goethe-Institut, finding music in shards

Boston Globe: Spektral Quartet at Goethe-Institut, finding music in shards

"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."

New York Classical Review: Spektral Quartet explores the invigorating quiet of noise

New York Classical Review: Spektral Quartet explores the invigorating quiet of noise

"Friday night at Bargemusic, Chicago’s Spektral Quartet delivered an invigorating and involving reminder of just how broad and deep the range of contemporary classical music is, via outstanding playing of equally outstanding new and recent works from Hans Thomalla and Beat Furrer."

The Boston Globe: For Spektral Quartet, modern music mixes well with humor

The Boston Globe: For Spektral Quartet, modern music mixes well with humor

"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."

New York Times: Frequency Festival in Chicago Offers the Complicated and Compelling

"...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..."

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Second Inversion: ALBUM REVIEW: Spektral Quartet’s “Serious Business”

Second Inversion: ALBUM REVIEW: Spektral Quartet’s “Serious Business”

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.

Chicago Tribune: Album of the Week 'Serious Business'

Chicago Tribune: Album of the Week 'Serious Business'

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.

Chicago Reader: Spektral Quartet give difficult music a friendly face

"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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