concert review: JACK Quartet and Joshua Roman

The air was smoky up in the City today - about 10% of the people I saw on the street were wearing breathing masks, not among them the man who wondered aloud to me if there was an epidemic - but I went up there anyway to be part of the small audience for this concert of extremely new string chamber music at Herbst.

The JACK Quartet is so named because those were the initials of the original members; it no longer quite fits. Joshua Roman, who joined them to make a quintet, is the cellist who has also been grabbed as a late substitute soloist for next week's SFS concert, which I'm going to.

The bulk of the concert consisted of works by four living American composers, the youngest of them Roman himself (he's 33). What struck me about these works was how four composers with such closely overlapping technical vocabularies could produce works with such different style and ethos.

That didn't mean they were all equally good, or equally bad, either. Amy Williams's string quartet was too dry and abstract, and John Zorn's piece for two cellos too noisy and frantic, to be very interesting. But the two pieces for full quintet were excellent, and not just because the composers were not afraid to include diatonic harmonies in their toolbox. Jefferson Friedman wrote an emotionally vivid tragic lament, full of long chromatic solo melodies over a variety of backgrounds, from piercing high held notes to pounding jagged rhythms that sounded as much like climaxes by Hovhaness as anything else. Roman's piece was an almost cinematic depiction of a tornado hitting the land of his Oklahoma childhood. It begins and ends with peaceful folk-like melodies, and in the middle goes wild with the effects, including alarm sirens wailing and Isserlis-like wooden doors banging.

Also on the program, something old but just as edgy: quintet arrangements of some 5-part Gesualdo madrigals. The arranger, a former JACK violinist, puts color in the pieces with nasal-sounding passages on the bridge.

In a Q&A session at the end, without mentioning which pieces or what I thought of them, I asked the performers if they were conscious of the same stylistic range in the choices as I was. Their answers all focused more on the importance of composers each learning to develop his or her own style, and on the pleasure of following a composer as it's developed. With all of this I certainly agree.