BISQC, day 5

The most exotic part of the Banff International String Quartet Composition comes in the Canadian Commission round. The idea of this round is to face the performers with a work for which they have no previous knowledge or preconceptions whatever. The organizers of this Canadian festival commission a Canadian composer - a different one each time - to write a 9-minute work for string quartet which all the competing groups play in a single marathon concert.

Sitting through one of these events - and this is the fourth time I've done it, twice in person and twice livestreamed - is quite an experience. Despite the brevity of the composition, it takes close to 3 hours to do it. And there isn't much music, however agreeable, that you really want to hear nine or ten times in a row. This time, at least, I did enjoy the piece, and despite weariness I did like it better the more I heard it. The fun comes in evaluating the nine or ten different approaches to the music.

The music was Rapprochement (String Quartet No. 3) by Kati Agócs (pronounced a-goach, rhymes with coach). It's a largely consonant piece, more focused on ensemble work than solos, filled with melodic phrases, lots of rising glissandi, and outbreaks of snappy rhythm. The composer says, "The score leaves lots of room for the players to shape nuances of dynamics, articulation, balances and color, and it calls upon the four individuals to play transcendently as one."

What I found was that the big division was between the groups that did "play transcendently as one," with a rich unified sound, and those who played in a more separated, transparent style. I found the former gave off the air in some passages of Glassian minimalism, while Lisa of the Iron Tongue, with whom I've been having postmortem conversations about the concerts, heard in the second group occasional echoes of Debussy and Stravinsky, which fits with my impression of the air if not the compositional style of high modernism, quite different from the more unified performers.

What mystified Lisa was that the performances ranged in length from 8 to 9 1/2 minutes, an unusually large range for such a short work. We didn't have the score to study; were there sections marked as optional? There were things I heard in some performances but not in others; did I just miss them, due perhaps to differences in style, or were they cut out?

Combining my evaluations with those of Lisa and Bruce H., the other participant in our conversations, I'd say the most unified performance, evidently what the composer intended, was from the Nerida, with a similar approach from Viatores and Elmire. The Arete, Cong, and Hana were more detached or transparent. Magenta was perhaps somewhere in between. The liveliest and wittiest performance came from Kairi, and the most intensely emotional from Poiesis.