A Characteristically Challenging, Entertaining Debut Album from the Mivos Quartet

It’s hard to believe that the Mivos Quartet haven’t made an album until now. For the past few years they’ve been one of the more pioneering new music ensembles in a city full of them, commissioning and premiering material left and right. So it makes sense that the album, titled Reappearances, would be an exciting, ambitious and extremely demanding lineup of works. And the quartet – violinists Olivia De Prato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Mariel Roberts – digs in and clearly has great fun with them, even while having to push the limits of their technique. The four pieces here call for mysterious whispers, sepulchral overtones, jarring stccato motives, the quietest washes, microtonal slides and sudden rhythmic leaps, among other demands. Challenging as all this music is, it’s also vividly evocative.

Alex Mincek‘s String Quartet No. 3 probably wasn’t written to evoke a bug machine at night, but it does: a swarm builds and then they all get zapped one by one. That’s overly reductionistic, of course: there’s much more going on. Harsh, almost barking figures enter spaciously; whispery, devillish filigrees, pianissimo ambience spiced with slippery slides and harmonics flit around each other and briefly converse until a theme coalesces about midway through. Individual voices, notably the viola and cello, exchange roles, anchoring the music with a gritty determination. A long crescendo marked by slowly rising washes punctuated by agitated staccato motives builds to a thicket of polyrhythms, then the critters begin disappearing, one by one until there are none.

Wolfgang Rihm‘s Quartettstudie sketches out how to work an idea. Rihm’s signature brooding earthtones engage in a careful, considered call-and-response. An acidic rondo eventually develops with considerably more animation, then the pensive ambience returns. Apropos of the composer, those who enjoy this piece will also like the RIAS Kammerchor‘s recent recording of  Rihm’s similarly enigmatic, more ethereal Astralis, recently released by Harmonia Mundi.

David Brynjar Franzson‘s On Repetition and Reappearances is the album’s most entertaining piece, a nonchalantly spooky if often wryly insectile study in suspense and negative space. Brief, flitting fragments of sound loom in from afar…or seemingly afar. Uh oh, GOTCHA. And then right when it seems that the pianissimo ambience afterward has faded to nothingness, they’re back! It reminds of the uneasy repetition of Erik Satie’s Vexations.

Felipe Lara‘s Corde Vocale, the final work here, is a study in wave motion, built from simple, swooping phrases like comets with the tail first. The way the entire ensemble attacks these, as if using a backward-masked effect, is sonically striking, to say the least. Voices converge and then go off into the ether again; shivery trills unwind into calmer, more resonant phrases; at the end, the ensemble hits an unexpectedly snarling moment on the way to a trick ending. It’s as much fun as the rest of the album and considerably louder.

The Mivos Quartet play the album release concert for this one on Dec 19 at 8 PM at the DiMenna Center, 450 W 37th St west of 9th Ave. $20 cover includes a copy of cd and a reception afterward. The program features premieres of works by Mark Barden, Dai Fujikura, and Scott Wollschleger, plus the Lara piece from the album.

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