Music

Takács Quartet bring Flow composition to New York stage | Music review by Anne Holzman (Spring 2024)

(Takács Quartet in concert, 92^nd Street Y/92NY, New York), March 13, 2024)

Suspended between two giants of the string quartet literature, Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama’s new composition, titled Flow, offered an escape into the Big Bang in the capable hands of the Takács Quartet at their March 13 concert.

The Takács Quartet commissioned the piece, prepared it in consultation with the composer, and first performed it at their home base in Boulder, Colo.  The New York performance should establish theirs as the definitive interpretation of a score that will now venture into the world of advanced strings repertoire.

The program at the 92^nd Street Y began with Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4, nicknamed Sunrise. Austrian composer Joseph Haydn wrote 68 string quartets, which are widely considered the foundation of the art form. This one, composed in 1797, was one of his last and most adventurous, shifting rapidly between tempos and straying from established key sequences.

The Takács gave the opening movement of Sunrise a light, ethereal sheen, using fast bow strokes and minimal vibrato. They playfully evoked birdsong and contrasted light and shadow. The second movement drew contrast with exaggerated slowness, delicately easing into pitches, but still with a soft clarity.

The Haydn third movement sounded more like traditional string quartet performances, regular and solid, as if to remind us of the canvas on which the rest was painted. The fourth movement combined the airy playfulness of the first movement with the rhythmic experimentation of the second. It takes a sophisticated, experienced ensemble to pull off the kind of collective tempo-bending on display here.

Our ears now primed for galactic adventures, the audience received a brief introduction to the new piece by Ngwenyama (nicknamed Tula).  Second violinist Harumi Rhodes rose to describe the development of the piece and the quartet’s experience with it.  Rhodes said that Flow opens “with dramatization of what the beginning of the Universe might have sounded like.”

She continued, “Tula orchestrates a conversation between some of her most favorite areas of research: Physics, chemistry, biology, and spirituality.” Through it all, Rhodes said, runs “this idea of flow, that constant, buzzing, vibrating energy” of the Universe. Rhodes noted that the performers appreciate the music’s “playfulness, sense of humor, theatrical range … and positive energy.”

Indeed, Flow begins with playful energy, tossing about strange harmonics (a string instrument technique that involves touching a string lightly while bowing fast to produce a thin, high-pitched sound), slides, and pizzicatos. This palette of unusual string sounds has become a standard opening gambit of modern composition, but Flow quickly finds order in the chaos. Rhythmic pulses establish themselves, overlap, disappear. Melodies appear and intertwine. It was not difficult to hear how the new piece fit with the Haydn quartet composed two centuries earlier. Both opening movements break between tempos and melodies above a pleasing harmonic base.

Although Flow does not stick to the classical quartet tradition of four movements (typically fast, slow, dance or scherzo, and stately), it does cover the customary terrain of contrasting dynamics and moods. The opening Big Bang gives way to a slower section in which extended solo melodies weave themselves into choruses. This is more reminiscent of Beethoven’s complexity than Haydn’s clarity. The Takács kept the playing style light, but, as in the Haydn second movement, allowed long suspensions of near-silence to resonate.

The quiet passage gives way to a burst of melody, as if a dance band had suddenly taken the stage. The next few minutes offered a bouquet of pretty tunes shot through with the weird buzziness left over from the Big Bang. I thought of stray electrons whizzing about among planets now fully formed and finding their orbits. Then the melodies began to disintegrate, seemingly helpless in the face of entropy, spinning into chaos. From my notebook: “I’m almost laughing at some of the cartoonish sounds.”

A clear break, perhaps a deep breath, leads Flow to its culmination in a full, balanced choral sound. This phase is not as warm as the earlier slow phase, but the harmonies are familiar, the melodies sustained and expressive, the conversation woven together in recognizable patterns. The piece ends with all four musicians playing fast at full tilt, quite a traditional finale except for some weird whistling that reminds us that we’re still out there beyond the stratosphere.

Even viewing the concert online, the decaying vibrations of the music seemed palpable. An intermission offered a bit of downtime as the audience burst into conversation, energy still vibrating audibly from the screen. The chatter kept up until the Takács Quartet came back for their second half, Beethoven’s String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2, part of the series labeled Razumovsky,  constituting much of the “middle Beethoven” string quartet repertoire.

Hearing the Beethoven quartet after Ngwenyama’s piece gave it a fresh frame. Beethoven’s first movement is full of fast runs of notes spilling in turn from the different instruments; like both Sunrise and Flow, it opens with alternating quick and slow passages. There were long pauses that seemed more prominent this time around, vibrating with the accumulated energy from the first half of the program.

After the irregularity of Flow, the Beethoven brought back the structures underlying classical-era composition. Written in 1806, the work follows fairly clear patterns of phrasing and balance among the instruments, although with less clarity as to key and chord progression than in Haydn. The music sounds familiar, if only because this repertoire is so widely performed, yet it seemed oddly unfamilar in the wake of Flow.

The second movement of this particular Beethoven quartet is said to have been written after the composer enjoyed an evening of stargazing – hence the choice for this program with the theme of exploring the universe. It was interesting to contemplate the balance of melody and harmony as an interpretation of 19^th century physics and mathematics, before the age of relativity and quantum mechanics. No quarks zinged through the silences; no asteroids whistled past. The planets moved with pleasing regularity, observed by an audience confident in the predictability of their motion.

Beethoven’s third movement served as a reminder of his distance late in life from his teacher, Haydn, as he took a Russian melody (the connection to his patron, Count Razumovsky), broke it, bent it and rearranged it. And the fourth is a wild romp through a Slavic dance, demanding the utmost virtuosity, which the Takács players were absolutely there for. From the entangled voices, they pulled out tiny shreds of melody, landed fast-paced offbeat entrances with panache, and displayed perfect ensemble playing that left abrupt pauses ringing with overtones.

The audience leaped to its feet and made even more noise than the quartet had made, and with good reason. It was a program full of big ideas delivered with energy and united by Flow.