The mandate for Live at the Pulitzer is to curate modern chamber music inspired by the art currently on view at the museum, which is Sarah Crowner, Around Orange, and Urban Archaeology: Lost Buildings of St. Louis, a collaboration with the National Building Arts Center. “Blue Black,” the monumental vertical painting by Ellsworth Kelly in the Pulitzer’s permanent collection that faces the audience watching musicians perform there, loomed large in Stark’s choices of music.
There is enough to talk about in this challenging music and these intense performances by five SLSO musicians, so I will leave the visual art out of this review. However, all five musical pieces curated by Stark are readily available online, and the Pulitzer is free, so I invite anyone to join me in popping in some earbuds and taking a close look at these two shows before the exhibitions close on February 4.
Stark curated three string quartets, one that also features a marimba, a solo viola piece (that also features a human voice), and a duet for cello and film. In his eloquent remarks about the program, Stark described his field of music as “niche.” There are good reasons why this kind of modern chamber music is not wildly popular. Such music typically includes dental drill tonalities and passages carefully crafted to sound like the musicians don’t know how to play their instruments in tune. A sold-out house at the Pulitzer had the patience and presence of mind to follow these demanding compositions and performances, all of which included – perhaps an inevitable metaphor, with the dental drill tonalities – some ear candy that yielded more simple pleasures.
This program of 21st-century music opened with Sky Macklay’s “Many Many Cadences” (2016). Stark introduced the piece as “virtuosic and ecstatic” with “brilliant colors,” which sums it up. The night’s core quartet – Hannah Ji and Angie Smart on violins, Chris Tantillo on viola and Jennifer Humphreys on cello – opened playing in lockstep. The cello first broke away from the lock-step quartet, then the viola, leading the violins into slow slides and curves. Macklay wrote a quartet not only for strings but also for theremins, DJ scratches on vinyl, glass harmonicas, and diving airplanes. It closed emphatically with all four players riffing with their left-hand fingertips – call it to lock pluck.
Leilehua Lanzilotti’s “ko’u inoa” (2017) for solo viola provided a meditative break after that breakneck journey. Tantillo’s expert hands wrought many, many sounds from four strings, a hunk of wood and a horsehair bow. This relentless composition has keening overtones that evoke the human voice, yet it was still strange and haunting when the viola was joined by human humming at the end. Afterward, Tantillo looked humbled by the experience of performing it for such a rapt audience.
Stark introduced Molly Joyce’s “Imperfection” (2022) as the most obsessive piece from the program “in driving home a single color,” but it also offered many, many intensities and opportunities for dynamic ensemble interplay. Ji took the lead on violin, then Humphreys took over with cello so rhythmic it felt anthemic – I had not thought of the cello as a vehicle for power chords. Something happened I can only think of as a hoedown, and then the doctor was in. If Lanzilotti’s solo viola piece was meditative, Joyce’s string quartet was worrisome – not that the music brought new worries, but rather it offered a new space to work out old ones.
Michael Gordon’s “Light is Calling” (2004), a duet for film and cello, has to be seen to be believed, and Bill Morrison, who composed the filmic element, has a recording of it on his YouTube channel. Stark told us that Morrison worked with “degraded archival film,” and he certainly made the most of it. I saw deep space, dark oceans, white moons, Matisse cut-outs, human bodies, waving flames, billowing smoke, melting nightmares, men in uniforms, men on horses, a woman with long straight black hair in a wedding dress, an officer and a woman dancing in and out of flames and smoke. At the end, Humphrey’s cello sounded wooshy, like the sound of film dying – perhaps an obvious idea for music paired with degraded film that looks like it’s burning to black, but figuring out how to write and then play wooshy cello for dying film stock were strokes of genius.
The program closed with Andy Akiho’s “LIgNEouS 1,” from LIgNEouS Suite (2010), with Kevin Ritenauer joining the quartet on marimba. With his back to the looming Ellsworth Kelly painting, Ritenauer looked toward the audience in looking at his colleagues facing each other in a semi-circle. So, we had a clear view of him as he played every piece of the marimba – the dangling resonators and frame as much as the tone bars – using every piece of the mallet, the shaft as much as the head. Everyone else played their stringed instrument as a percussive element much of the time. Ji fingerpicked the violin. Humphreys plucked the cello like a washtub bass. Then all the strings followed Ritenauer as he broke into a pop melody on the marimba, playing good old-fashioned melody and rhythm like what people sing and dance to, before the violins descended as sirens leading everyone into a breakdown fugue ending with four simultaneous chord crashes on all five instruments. That was the most virtuosic small-group performance I have ever seen.
The other two Live at the Pulitzer shows this season are on January 30 and April 9. They both will sell out if they have not already. Visit SLSO.org.