The Globe and Mail, Toronto
Tuesday, January 7, 1997

Fluent, passionate and direct strings

The password was "minimalism" for the Penderecki String Quartet's concert on Sunday afternoon, the third program of the Generation X, Y & Z New Music festival at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Although minimalism is an elusive category, the selections presented a unified face, even if the paths the composers took to get there were very different. And while the generations of the composers spanned 30 years, the pieces chosen were mostly recent ones; the oldest work, by Arvo Part, dated back only to 1977.

The Penderecki Quartet, which is the resident quartet at Wilfrid Laurier University, made its own distinctions in grouping the works together. The pieces on the first half were slow; those on the second were faster (although certainly not fast). The opening work, British composer Gavin Bryars's String Quartet No. 1 (Between the National and the Bristol), exhibited many of the elements heard throught the concert -- simple, recognizable material that was isolated, fragmented, subjected continually to small alterations or repeated within a relatively consonant harmonic matrix. Emotions were somewhat distanced, although the atmosphere in Bryars's piece was often one of loss, or of something broken but still functioning.

Bryars spoke of coming to terms with the "quasi-privacy" of the string quartet in order to write this piece, and he has created an even more intense privacy with his fragile timbres and soft dynamics. The sense here, and in the works that followed by John Oswald, Linda Catlin Smith, Part, and to a lesser extent Henryk Gorecki, is of a world entered through the eye of a needle. And it's no small credit to the Penderecki Quartet that each of these worlds was the unique, concentrated, highly musical place it was.

The slow-motion kaleidoscope of Oswald's artful plundering of Beethoven's Op. 130 in pre-Lieu, for example -- an extract from a larger work written for the Kronos Quartet in 1991 -- was interpreted with a supple precision that did it justice on an intellectual as well as a purely musical level. Similarly, the Penderecki Quartet caught both the sensuality and the cool abstraction of Smith's small jewel, As You Pass a Reflective Surface, following shifts in perspective that allow one to imagine a glass-like surface one moment and a watery pond the next, shot with shafts of sunlight and tendrils of melody.

Oddly, Beethoven's spirit was not an isolated occurrence on this program. It was present in Part's Fratres, which, like the slow movement of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 132, turns an archaic hymn tune and old organ-stop timbres to profound reflective purposes. NAC composer adviser Jon Siddall also looked to Beethoven and to his Viennese predecessors -- especially Haydn -- as inspiration for his Vienna Patterns, a piece full of jaunty false starts and coy but repetitive puns.

Although Gorecki uses many of the same minimalist techniques, his String Quartet No. 2 inhabits much more emotionally explicit territory. Here a relentless pulse is paired variously to a mournful incantatory melody, a violent evocation of oppression, the wail of sirens, and the frenzied bow strokes of village fiddlers. And in an interpretation that was fluent, passionate and direct, the Penderecki Quartet demonstrated, as they had throughout the concert, that their contribution to the success of this program was far from minimal.

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