Quatuor Bozzini;
Portrait Montréal
Quatuor Bozzini (The Bozzini Quartet) – Portrait Montréal
Clemens Merkel [violin] – Nadia Francavilla [violin] - Stéphanie Bozzini [viola] - Isabelle Bozzini [cello]
qb CQB 0401. Duration: 60:56.
This is the first CD by The Bozzini Quartet of their own making, and the start of what proves to be a very tempting, interesting series with the Canadian quartet on their qb label, in collaboration with DAME.
The first thing that strikes me about this series from Quatuor Bozzini is the packaging. Jean-François Denis has outdone himself this time. The packaging he’s designed for Empreintes DIGITALes has become famous and admired, but the design he’s come up with for the Quatuor Bozzini series (or perhaps for all the CD s that are channeled through Dame?) is even more sophisticated, and I would assume that this complex a CD package must cost much more than printing the CDs! Anyway, very artistic and pleasurable! Some extraneous scientific information is also provided, inserted here and there on the foldout packaging, like a makeshift km/miles conversion table etcetera! The geometry is a bit bewildering to the eyes, causing visual illusions that fool you into thinking that the cover is cut the wrong way or put together in a faulty fashion, but this is a premeditated illusion, because there is nothing wrong with the folding-out or folding-back – it’s all perfect. Wow! Someone thought a LOT about these CD covers! (Jean-François Denis?)
However, I tend to take the CDs out of such packaging and assign them at least a plastic slim-case, to protect them from scratches when you pull them out and stick them in.
Track 1 is Claude Vivier’s Pulau Dewata. He says about the work:
| What I wanted to write was a piece imbued with the spirit of Bali: its dances, its rhythms and, above all, an explosion of life, simple and candid. The ending is the traditional signature of many Balinese pieces, a loving homage to this marvelous people from whom I learned so much. |
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A few simply put statements open the quartet (or are they questions?), soon to pick up on a slightly minimalist atmosphere, which however, in turn, swells into a denser situation, into which Bartók staccatos cut diagonally like hard rain outside your window in Cornwall. Yes, I find a British nuance to this music – not Balinese, as you’d expect…
At times the viola and the violins play hide and seek, or maybe they dance around the room with mirrors in their hands, held in front of themselves, momentarily reflecting the opponents/comrades.
Hasty motions are interspersed with short, reflective insertions – a child stopping for a second to catch his breath, looking around for his playmates, breathing hard, the breast moving out and in – and then his on the run again.
For a while the Bozzinis even soar into an Arvo Pärt lucidity, playing semi-transparent mist across the spoils of Time…
No matter how hard I try, I don’t sense any gamelan in here, and nothing Asian at all, but rather a reverence to minimalist forerunners and people like Kevin Volans and Michael Nyman, and a smidgen Osvaldas Balakauskas too…. Not that I have to find analogies, but I do anyway, unconsciously, because that’s the way my mind works, finding patterns, traces, lineages, directions, tendencies.
With only a few minutes to go, the players form a circle and begin a dance figure straight out of the courts of the 18th century, very gallant and delicate, the melody swirling around the group, in a touch-and-go manner, moving without effort, light as a child’s timelessness, leaving just a trace of sadness in their eyes...
So, for me it’s hard to find an identity here, in this quartet; a clear contour, a declaration of intentions - but what does it matter! It’s just to listen and enjoy, and let the music move through yourself like scattered thoughts through the streets of Bristol…
The second piece on the CD is Jean Lesage’s Quatuor à cordes II, on tracks 2 – 7, divided into sections according to the sub-titles/indications Divertimento serioso; Round, Catch and Canon Club; Divertimento buffo; Mr. Birdcage’s Ground; Tombeau; Musique sur laquelle il n’est pas interdit de danser.
Lesage let’s Umberto Eco talk in his place:
| The postmodern response to modernism consists in the acknowledgement that the past, given that it cannot be destroyed since the destruction would lead to silence, must be revisited: with irony, in a non-innocent manner |
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Surely, a divertimento – and perhaps a little thoughtful, serious, yes… A semi-modern art music piece, never crossing over into avant-garde, but rising slightly out of the modernism of the 1950s…
The flow of tones is speedy, glaring – a haze of thorny bushes moving in the wind, letting the sunlight through in impressionistic bites of light!
Second part hardly touches the strings, the bows bouncing in the background, the motion of the music candid, spiraling: a merry-go-round rising from the carnival, screwing itself up into those white summer clouds… finally causing some havoc up among the air spirits, busying themselves with cloud-gathering for a thunderclap party!
Third section reflects those fluent quartet pieces of Terry Riley’s Cadenza On The Night Plain; Sunrise Of The Planetary Dream Collector: The Bozzinis playing Kronos! Nothing wrong with that: Kronos are good role models for almost anything!
Section four of this string quartet is a silent and cautious treader of trails, but four headlamps shine across the moor – and densifications lump tonal inconsistencies together into tussocks for stumble-feet, caught in the acts and counteracts of organs of equilibrium and a planetary gravity that is always on, always – damn it! – on!
There is a stubborn left-wing motion present, as the quartet swerves into a downwards spiral through space, but through space everything is falling, falling, falling – and this quartet is just another act of falling, like stars are falling, like worlds are, like lives, like you and I and it and them are falling, like the Founding Fathers are falling, like the jackdaws are falling through the air of November as the towns bundle up for the night…
Part five is Tombeau, and perhaps I can feel the mist of a graveyard gently extending its fingers of semi-transparency, soothingly feeling the inscriptions: Only The Worst Is Bad Enough!
Quatuor Bozzini closes ranks and conjures up long-lost spirits in these winding bands of regret, emitting whatever is left of remorse and nostalgia into tender bowings and glissandi of stolen glimpses, guarded moments… Beautiful scoring, wonderful instrumental execution: a culmination of string quartet beauty, so natural and organic that you forget to think in terms of music or even art. It’s just life – life and life only!
The last section of Jean Lesage’s quartet brings more sturdy reminiscences of quartet literature to the fore, gathering influences from all over, calling them in and funneling them through a narrow and dense passage of the score, into a new world of star-tingling voids and sweeping musical gestures beyond; a fruit of all this cross-breeding that is viable: a diamond falling away in space, turning as it falls though benevolent darkness, reflecting starlight and glowing thoughts adrift from their thinkers: thoughts reaching their plasma states, later to condense on the window of Rigpa, starting new, futile thoughtforms, midwifes of new worlds and innumerable, unnecessary rebirths…
Michael Oesterle’s Daydream Mechanics V is allotted track 8. Oesterle says:
| The phrase ‘Daydream Mechanics’ is taken from the title of a book by Quebec poet Nicole Brossard. This is the fifth in a series of pieces with this title, all of which use mechanistic devices to provide the base material. This quartet recalls the awkward adventures of childhood when the backyard seemed as full of fearsome possibilities as any unexplored geography. The simple mechanics of controlling one’s own maneuvers make a challenge of a cultivated wilderness. |
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It begins in a slashing whisper – or is it the hissing of a snake (or the hissing of summer lawns [J. Mitchell!]). Right away the music gets stuck in a figure, like a motion of a machine starting over and over; some kind of cog-wheel in an old mill, powered by the mill-wheel in the rapids… but malfunctioning, losing its capacity for grinding by not connecting properly to the shaft; only achieving this idling motion that sounds so nice! It’s like someone playing a hurdy-gurdy, just turning the handle round and around, around and round.
The mood shifts slightly as a deeper layer is entered, and the peculiar stops in the rhythm have you on your toes, all ears, like it should be. When the character of the music forces you to listen this hard, you enjoy every little nuance so much – and in Daydream Mechanics you listen with all your senses. You enter the circling motions of this instrumental dance, which lures you deeper and deeper into enchantment.
This is the peak of the CD so far for me! So much pleasure, so much spirit and such a light predisposition! The universe bends back on itself, and there’s no way of knowing which is which, what is what, and what is or isn’t…
Malcolm Goldstein is the final contributor to this CD, with his quartet A New Song of Many Faces for In These Times, with the subtitle (or the explanation, or the indication or simply the order of sub-movements) a gently flowing song; a brutal song; an agitated song; a song of inner vision – coda.
Goldstein:
| The music is a structured improvisation composition in which the overall structure, as well as the process of development of each song, are pre-set, and performance materials and techniques are clearly delineated. The element of improvisation then becomes the process through which all the musical materials are realized, moment to moment, by each musician within the framework of the composition. |
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Here is Goldstein's introduction to the same quartet on the earlier Hardscrabble Songs CD on In Situ:
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The string quartet is a linear structure of variations, completed by an extensive coda; four aspects – 1. A gently flowing song; II. A brutal song; III. An agitated song; IV: A song of inner vision – that are variant perspectives of a song, which is itself never heard, each rendered by one of the instrumentalists in sequence. (The song itself can be thought/imagined as a composite of these four variations, perhaps only to be perceived by its numerous aspects.)
They are responded to with a coda consisting of a melody (source originally being a hymn tune, “The Sweet Bye and Bye”, that was transformed by Joe Hill’s words into an IWW song, “The Preacher and the Slave”), along with other source materials from Ives and Beethoven that leave the door open for questions. A more complete title of the piece might be: “A New Song of many faces for In These Times, with a coda, the Same Old Song needed to be heard again and again”.
The music is structured improvisation composition. The overall structure, as well as the process of development within each song, is pre-set, and performance materials and techniques are clearly delineated. The element of improvisation then becomes the process through which all of the musical materials are realized by each musician, moment to moment, in their own way within the framework of the composition.
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This is what I wrote about this string quartet when the Bozzini Quartet performed it on the Hardscrabble Songs CD:
This string quartet in one movement is the longest work on the CD with its 19 minutes. It was recorded at Théâtre la Chapelle in Montreal 4th May 2002. Goldstein tells me in a letter (yes, letter; handwritten!) that he recorded it himself in front of the stage on a cassette recorder.
It begins rather matter-of-factly, a cat’s walk up the alley, whiskers shaking in a guarded way, nothing really bothering the day, nor embellishing it either. This is a trudging progression, at times drooping seriously before picking up some everyday courage again, no grand gestures, nothing to take much note of – just a string quartet made up of four shadows of silence intertwined across the asphalt…
The music doesn’t stay in that atmosphere for too long, though, because the quartet gets into rattling bow bouncing dances and other Goldsteinean behaviors, though the overall dryness of the sound keeps even the ferocity of some expressions a little on the chalk side of the blackboard, intellectually trimmed and spectacled, in a New England kind of way… brick buildings and learned deans…
I have heard some string quartets out on a limb, by, for example, Iannis Xenakis and Giacinto Scelsi – but I think Goldstein outshines their lunatic wittiness with this limping, scratching, bouncing and rake dragging quartet, which – even in its intellectual chalk dust guise – manages to pull this art form into untraveled realms for strings, which could be a suiting subtitle to the work; Untraveled Realms for Strings…
The players are kept surprisingly still and silent almost throughout, to the extent that the hiss of the tape – or the soaring ambience of the live event – rises almost to the level of the sounds from the instruments. After listening to about half the piece, I find it quite introverted and seriously meditative; a good vehicle for staring out the window when it rains, or staring at the ceiling while lying down… and I feel some age in this music, layers upon layers of experiences thinned out and refined in this raking process for strings, that finally touches your forehead with the soothing touch of your mother’s wrinkled old hand… |
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In a letter from Malcolm Goldstein about his string quartet and the two existing recordings by Quatuor Bozzini (the latest one on this CD), Malcolm wrote:
How do I feel about the Goldstein quartet then, on this Bozzini CD? Well, first of all, the quality of the sound turns perspectives around quite a bit. There is a long way from Goldstein’s cassette recorder at Théâtre la Chapelle in Montreal to the state of art digital equipment of Salle Gilles-Lefebvre at Centre d’arts Orford. Even though the prerequisites are identical, the quartet is a different one here. Like Goldstein said in his letter, it would be interesting to sit down and do a thorough comparison between the two recordings.
There is a change in the group too. Nadia Francavilla has taken Geneviève Beaudry’s place at one of the violins.
Ah… they dare to start with… silencessshhhh!
After silence, a number of bird-looking questions marks on the snow – and then tiger tight motions, yes, like muscles moving under the skin of a tiger prowling, close to the ground like we’ve all seen cats do!
Goldstein’s elf-like apparition shines through the music in a mild benevolence, the body of the music at times breaking out in spasms and thudding involuntarities: you’d better watch the flying bows, cutting the air like rotor blades, sawing granite into Gaudish building blocks, none of them with right angles – a method of playing that has more to do with sketching jackdaws on a large piece of white paper with a sincerely hard-tipped pencil than with handling violins, viola and cello.
Take a needle in your hand and cut into cardboard with all your curious focus, oblivious of anything else – and you get an idea of how it must feel to write some of this music. On the other hand, find a deserted (except for an old wasps’ nest in the ceiling) pavilion in a turned away apple orchard from the 19th century – on a misty, moist November’s day of Scandinavia: sit down on the steps, look into the orchard, observe the lichen on the old stems; smell the moldering leaves – and you understand the peace that Goldstein has written into other sections of his quartet.
I’ll leave it at that, with much more to say left behind my fingers over the keyboard, withheld in a long gaze, a held breath – and the beauty of some feelings not materialized in thoughts. Praise be! Maguc music surrounds me like incense, from Vermont, from Quebec, from Goldisthan!
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