Raphaël Pannier Puts Out a Gorgeously Edgy, Genre-Defying Album

Miguel Zenon was a synergistic choice as musical director for drummer Raphaël Pannier‘s latest album, Fuane, streaming at Bandcamp. Pannier has just as much fun pushing the boundaries of classical music as he does with jazz. While Zenon may be best known for his Puerto Rican jazz roots, he’s also recorded bracing, paradigm-shifting, Bartokian works for alto sax and string quartet. François Moutin joins them on bass, with Aaron Goldberg handling piano on the more straightforwardly jazz-oriented numbers, handing off to Giorgi Mikadze on the more classically-flavored tracks. It’s not every day you hear a drummer on an Olivier Messien composition – although it’s a fair bet that the composer would approve.

They open with an aptly desolate, expansive take of Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman. Zenon floats mournfully over Goldberg’s judiciously glittering chords as Pannier and Moutin flicker and flutter, drawing the sax down into the morass. The impressionistic lustre in Goldbedrg’s solo is a side of him we too seldom get to see on record, Zenon scampering and wailing to angst-fueled heights, then making way for Moutin’s furtive concluding dash.

Moutain stays out front for his scrambling chords and wryly dancing lines in Midtown Blues: more comedic moments ensue in what seems to be a spot-on portrait of self-important Manhattan lunch-hour madness. The quartet expand on variations on a distinctly uneasy, Middle Eastern-tinged theme in Lullaby, a deliciously pointillistic, insistent Zenon solo at the center.

Mikadze takes over piano in Pannier’s trio arrangement of Messiaen’s Le Baiser de l’Enfant Jésus, one of the final segments of his Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus suite. Zenon wafts tenderly and descends gently as the piano shifts between a warmly emphatic intensity and the composer’s signature icy, otherworldly tonalities, Pannier subtly coloring in the center.

Pannier and Goldberg bookend Wayne Shorter’s ESP with a clenched-teeth menace; in between, Zenon takes a terse, airy approach at a distance from the underlying phantasmagoria, Goldberg sprinting far from the shadows. Mikadze returns for a a reinvention of Ravel’s Forlane, Zenon switched out for Moutin. With its eerie marionettish theme and flamenco allusions, it’s a good counterpart to the Messiaen piece, Pannier setting loose waves of epic grandeur and then moments of puckish humor.

The group return to Pannier originals with Fauna, moving from uneasy, kinetically loopy phrases to a rhythmically tricky, bittersweet ballad at escape velocity, Goldberg at his lyrical peak with his ripples and cascades, Moutin spinning around frantically at the center: it’s a showstopper and the best song on the album..

They ramp up the nocturnal mood in the fugal exchanges and glittering soca party vibe of Capricho de Raphael, by Brazilian bandolinist Hamilton de Holanda. Mikadze takes over piano again on the concluding diptych, Monkey Puzzle Tree, with its carnivalesque stairstepping, Zenon a dancing pierrot in between disquieting, energetic rises and falls. They take it out on a jaunty, dancing note.

Pannier’s next gig as a leader on his home turf in France is April 23 at the Jazz in Noyon Festival. And Goldberg is playing with edgy violinist Zach Brock and bassist Matt Penman at Mezzrow on March 23, with sets at 7:30 and 9 PM. Cover is $25 cash at the door.

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Angelica Olstad Captures the Terror and Alienation of the First Few Months of the Lockdown

Pianist Angelica Olstad ls one of the few New York artists to be able to put the tortuous first several months of the lockdown to creative use. Her new solo release Transmute – streaming at Bandcamp – is a haunting, often downright chilling, rather minimalist recording of a series of themes from four French Romantic works. Olstad reimagines them as a suite illustrating the terror and isolation of the beginning of the most hideously repressive year in American history. And it isn’t over yet. In the meantime we owe a considerable debt to Olstad for how indelibly and lyrically she has portrayed it.

Rather than playing any of the four pieces here all the way through, she deconstructs them, usually to find their most menacing or macabre themes. Then she pulls those even further apart, or loops them. Erik Satie is the obvious reference point. The first and most troubled segment is based on The Fountain of the Acqua Paola from Charles Griffes’ Roman Sketches, Op. 7. It turns out to be a creepy, loopy arpeggio matched by skeletal lefthand, with light electronic touches and snippets of field recordings. Yes, some of them are sirens. A simple, icy upper-register melody develops, then recedes, the menacing music-box melody returning at the end.

Track two, Death + Sourdough is a mashup of a handful of themes from the Ravel Sonatine, at first reducing it to a rising series of Satie-esque snippets. Then Olstad hits an elegant, ornate series of chords, but once again loops them. She returns with an even more troubled, resonant minimalism.

An Awakening, based on the Oiseaux Triste interlude from Ravel’s Miroirs has spacious glitter over spare lefthand, distant sirens and crowd noise from Black Lives Matter protests panning the speakers

The closest thing to a straightforward performance of the original is her steady, rippling, picturesque take of Cygne sur l’eau from Gabriel Faure’s Mirages; she titles it Brave New World. Here and only here does the music grow warmer and offer a glimmer of hope, tentative as she seems to see it. Let’s hope that’s an omen for days to come. If she’s brave, maybe we’ll be lucky to see Olstad in concert somewhere in New York this year.

Yet Another Lush, Picturesque Concert Album From the London Philharmonic

For the past several years, the London Philharmonic Orchestra has been releasing one live recording after another. Clearly, they cherrypick their concerts for particularly prime performances. One such came out last fall: a choice program of works by Ravel and Debussy, conducted meticulously and purposefully by François-Xavier Roth and streaming at Spotify.

Beyond the simple pairing of a couple of French impressionists, it’s a smart choice of pieces. Roth considered the famous, chromatic descending progression of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and immediately thought of the big riff from Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole – or the other way around.

This is often a very suspenseful recording. While the cd booklet doesn’t specify the location where the concert was recorded, there’s a generous amount of natural reverb, soloists bright and clear over the lushness of the massed high strings somewhat muted behind them.

Rising from almost complete silence, Roth leads the ensemble in a terse, hushed, relentlessly uneasy pulse, even beyond the first flamenco flute cadenza of the Rapsodie espagnole. The momentary Malaguena dance is coyly and elegantly phantasmagorical; the Habanera, starry and lustrous until sudden flashes of fireworks. The dynamics of the coda are on the restrained side for the most part. adding considerable and rather unexpected poignancy and make the finale seem even more explosive.

The take of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is similarly cautious and low-key, straight through to the woodwinds and the soloists, although Roth plays up the Spanish tinges as you would hope he’d do with this program. Then, when you would least expect it, everybody picks up the pace for a bit before returning to a pastorale that’s short of being languid. This is late afternoon and Bambi is on the lookout for guys with guns!

For Debussy, the ocean wasn’t the empire it was for Vaughan Williams, or the passion it was for Mendelssohn…or the potentially apocalyptic vortex it is for John Luther Adams. Debussy gravitated toward the coast, and this version of La mer is all about seashore, and waves and tidal motion, maybe in a sailboat but not out on the high seas.

Sudden but careful swells, flickering brass and winds lapping the beach color the opening movement: even a couple of passing storms steer clear of full-on thunder until the very end. What’s delightful about Roth’s interpretation is that this comes across e just as much of a nightscape, even if the composer specifies dawn til noon.

Roth also brings up the hidden flamenco touches in the playful waves of the second movement along with some dazzling sunbursts. The concluding duel between wind and waves is for the most part a genteel one, with more than one wry reference to the album’s previous woodsy scenario. Even if you’ve heard these pieces plenty of times, this album lures you to rediscover them.

An Urbane, Greek-Adjacent New Live Album From the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center just got back from tour in Greece…and brought a record back with them. Their new album, Odyssey – streaming at PBS – bolsters the argument that more artists should make live albums, classical ensembles included. It’s also genteel party music. 0riginally broadcast on PBS” Live From Lincoln Center, it features both standard repertoire and more obscure material diversely associated with Hellenic culture.

It begins with Tara Helen O’Connor’s dynamically swaying, often broodingly muted solo take of Debussy’s Syrinx for Flute and concludes with a gregariously cheery, occasionally beery rendition of Mendelssohn’s Octet For Strings in E-flat major. The ensemble – violinists Sean Lee, Danbi Um, Aaron Boyd and Arnaud Sussmann; violists Matthew Lipman and Paul Neubauer; and cellists David Finckel and Dmitri Atapine – have a particularly good time with the teenage composer’s clever echo effects in the second movement.

The two partitas in between have a more distinctly Greek flavor. Emily D’Angelo brings an unexpected arioso intensity to the miniatures of Ravel’s Cinq Melodies Populaires Grecques for Voice and Piano, over Wu Han’s nimble shifts from Middle Eastern-tinged chromatics to misty, muted Mediterranean balladry. Then Neubauer teams with Boyd for a quartet of short pieces from George Tsontakis” Knickknacks for Violin and Viola. The only Greek composer included on the album gets a particularly strong interpretation: with the music’s insistently rhythmic, acerbic call-and-response enhanced by excellent recording quality, the duo evoke a considerably larger ensemble.

Then they team with O’Connor for Beethoven’s Serenade in D major, which the extensive liner notes describe as “a bit of nostalgia marking the end of an era.” Well put: Mozart is cited as an influence, and the Italian baroque also seems to be a strong reference in the livelier, more balletesque movements.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center – a roughly 180-member, rotating cast of world-class talent – are celebrating fifty years of exploring the vast world of small-ensemble repertoire, in intimate performances that continue year-round from their home base at Alice Tully Hall.

A Visceral, Marathon Performance by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall

There was electricity in the air Thursday night at Carnegie Hall, where a sold-out crowd witnessed conductor Pablo Heras-Casaldo leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s through a marathon performance of two symphonies, a famous piano concerto and a clever mini-suite that should be more popular than it is.

There’s always a curmudgeon somewhere. “They’re playing the Prokofiev first?” an older guy in the orchestra section scowled to his date, a pretty young brunette in a tight black sweater. “That’s anticlimactic.”

“That’s daring,” she deadpanned. Both turned out to be right.

From the quasi-Haydn of the exchanges in the opening movement of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, it sparkled with distinct voicings, jaunty accents and sotto-voce humor. It’s not Bohemian Rhapsody, but parts of it are close: the composer clearly had a great time toying with short, punchy, late 18th century-style Germanic phrasing. The pseudo-Mozart of the third movement was the most irrestistibly funny part, yet tellingly, Heras-Casaldo and the ensemble glimmered most memorably in the saturnine second movement. That’s where Prokofiev leaves no doubt as to who wrote it – and that bittersweetness will prevail at least for the time being. The coda seemed a little fast; then again, it’s hard to argue with how much fun the group were having, running red lights all the way.

Pianist Hélène Grimaud earned several standing ovations for a breathtakingly visceral take of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. From its gleeful opening glissandos, through plenty of the ravishing bolero and flamenco-tinged phrasing that the composer loved so much, to the sharply polished, steely interweave of the third movement, she matched meticulous precision to mighty joie de vivre.

It was going to be hard to top that. By now, it was all the more impressive how seamlessly the orchestra had negotiated a rugged road, constantly shifting gears between the early classical period, Russian Romanticism, the early modern, and foreshadowing flickers of flamenco jazz. There would be even more new terrain in Stravinsky’s Suite No. 1 for Small Orchestra, a whistle-stop tour of tarantella, flamenco and finally Russian folk influences fleshed out with an arrangement that’s carnivalesque if not completely phantasmagorical.

They closed with an old warhorse, Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 in E Flat, from 1795. Once again, Heras-Casaldo and the group seemed to be having a ball with the endless volleys of call-and-response from both individual voices and segments of the orchestra. In the same vein as their rendition of the Prokofiev, this turned out to be more boisterous and beery than – as the curmudgeon groused to his companion – simply banquet music for the landed gentry of Napoleonic Europe.

The Orchestra of St. Luke’s next show is April 25 at 8 PM at New York City Center, joining soprano Victoria Clark in a performance of Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark; $30 tix are available.

Transcendent, Troubled, Richly Relevant Sounds with the Chelsea Symphony Saturday Night

Saturday night the Chelsea Symphony – New York’s most intimate orchestral experience – left the audience spellbound with a program that was a fearlessly relevant as it was stylistically vast.

The coda was a poignant, kinetically evocative version of Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin that was more dynamic than a famous recording by George Solti and the Chicago Symphony, and had more slink and dark ripple than another by the Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of Pierre Boulez. With a calm meticulousness on the podium, the Chelsea Symphony’s Matthew Aubin brought the war veteran composer’s angst-ridden, distantly Andalucian-influenced WWI-era shout-out to people and an era gone forever into sharp, envelopingly wistful focus. Solos throughout were strikingly direct, especially Jason Smoller’s long, plaintive passage, horn player Emily Wong voicing reason through battlefield smoke a little later. 

There isn’t enough room in the New York Philharmonic for all the great musicians in New York: the Chelsea Symphony is one of the places where they can be found. What differentiates the Chelsea ensemble is that since their season is shorter, they have more time for rehearsals – a grand total of five for this particular bill – and this year, the orchestra have dedicated themselves to socially aware programming. No art for art’s sake this year: it’s all about keeping the music grounded in reality.

Chelsea Symphony bassist and composer Tim Kiah introduced the world premiere of his suite Fascist Baby, contemplating how we can keep our children from going over to the dark side. By implication, certainly, no child is born a fascist: the title is a question rather than an epithet. Kiah’s answer to that question, he said, would be to scare that kid a little, but also to offer hope, precisely what his suite accomplished. From a massed scream in the introduction, through calmer, more bittersweet passages utilizing the entire sonic spectrum a la Gil Evanas, to stabbing, Shostakovian horror and then backing away, solace seemed to trump menace.Conductor Reuben Blundell seemed as swept up in the suspense as to how it would turn out as everybody else was.

He also conducted the night’s second piece, Haydn’s First Cello Concerto, with soloist Erich Schoen-Rene. For those who might have preferred sedate, civilized Haydn, this was not the answer, but for those who wanted to revel in the composer’s irrepressible humor, playful jousting and “gotcha” phrases, this was a real romp. It was also the only point during the evening when there were any issues: in this case, tuning, probably weather-related. St. Paul’s Church on 22nd St. is a charming place to see an orchestra, but drafty 19th century buildings can be challenging for string sections when it’s cold outside.

The night’s centerpiece was what may have been the American premiere of Fernande Decruck’s 5 Poems for Soprano and Chamber Orchestra. The Chelsea Symphony have singlehandedly springboarded a revival of the mid-20th composer’s symphonic work, and Aubin has become the world’s leading Decruck scholar. He’s right in calling her extraordinary: one of the few women composers whose work was frequently played throughout Europe in the 1940s, her career was tragically cut short.

In a stroke of synchronicity, both the original 1944 version of this piece as well as the Ravel had been premiered by the same French ensemble, the Ochestre Colonne. Additionally, Decruck and her multi-instrumentalist husband, who played in the New York Philharmonic, lived in the London Terrace apartments in Chelsea, just a few blocks away, during the 1930s.

Introducing the piece, Aubin mentioned a possible political subtext: although the suite derives from liturgical themes, religion barely factors into Decruck’s oeuvre. Rather, the five sections came across as more of a harrowing, relentlessly elegaic commentary on the horrors of war, and as much of a condemnation of those who collaborated with the enemy. Soprano Kate Maroney kept those dynamics front and center, finally rising to an accusatory peak over an insistently somber backdrop. The bass section in particular stood out here, both in the stern first part and later in a surreal, hypnotically brooding one-chord bolero of sorts. Both years ahead of its time and timeless, there’s never been a better moment for this music to be resurgent. If this was recorded, the Chelsea Symphony ought to release it.

The Chelsea Symphony’s next concerts are May 18 at 8 PM, repeating on the 19th at 2 at the DiMenna Center, featuring Shostakovich’s harrowing Symphony No. 5 as well as works by Dvorak, Courtney Bryan and Eric Ewazen. Suggested donation is $20.

Haunting Intensity from the Navarra String Quartet at Lincoln Center

Just about every month this spring, there’s a free classical concert at the Lincoln Center atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd Street in conjunction with the current Great Performers series. There’s also just about every other stye of music made in every community in New York here too. It’s especially interesting to see who turns out for the classical shows. Last night a packed house representing just about every age group and community here in town was treated to a performance by UK group the Navarra String Quartet.

Cellist Brian O’Kane introduced Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks’ music as “Full of beautiful landscapes, very atmospheric…one can hear his love of nature and quite a lot of spirituality. In contrast, there are quite a few episodes of struggle after a very horrible regime in the Eastern Bloc.”

The group moved gently into the stillness, ghostly glissandos and subtle trills of the opening movement of his 1999 String Quartet No. 4. O’Kane anchored the group’s slow climb from brooding austerity to agitation and then back, violinists Magnus and Marije Johnston rising alongside Sascha Bota’s viola.

Furtively circling, rhythmic variations on a chase theme grew to a blaze, reflecting O’Kane’s comments about the music’s political content. The group channeled desolation and loss in a muted series of ominously stacked, Arvo Part-like harmonies, going deep into the relentless angst as the music peaked in a series of waves.

The contrast between the violins and the lower instruments underscored a growing terror as the chase scene recurred: no doubt this kind of thing happened all the time when the KGB were prowling Vasks’ home turf. Exchanges of guarded prayerfulness and forlorn resignation mingled in the mist; Bota adding  hushed, somberly tremoloing pedalpoint. The eerily wafting conclusion offered no sense of closure: the audience, who’d already been taken by surprise by the composer’s many full stops earlier i the work, slowly processed the intensity.

Right at the second the group returned to the stage for Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major, a siren wailed down Columbus Avenue. Undeterred, the quartet built Parisian wistfulness toward a heroic overture, Magnus Johnston’s silken but aching lines telgraphing that all would not be fin de siècle contentment here.

The group’s vigorous pizzicato had the same effect in the waltzing second movement, foreshadowing the twists and turbulence that ends up infusing the dance. The wounded calm the ensemble built in the third was as it was gorgeous, especially when they hit the big crescendo. Likewise, their fiery launch into the fourth. Credit the quartet for realizing what a perhaps surprisingly good segue it made after the harrowing intensity of the first half od the program.

They encored with a moody miniature by Kurtag, “To calm ourselves down,” as O’Kane grinned. The next Lincoln Center atrium concert is on Valentine’s Day at 7:30 PM with energetic, individualistic Cape Verde islands singer/guitarist Tcheka. Show up early if you want a seat.

Saluting One of New York’s Great Music Advocacy Organizations at Lincoln Center Last Night

Every generation tends to view successive ones as being more and more effete. That preconception becomes all the harder to argue with in an age where daily life for so much of the population is becoming more and more virtual and less and less real. Why drag yourself to Manhattan at rush hour to immerse yourself in a sublime and intimate performance when you could get a virtual equivalent on Facebook Live? 

So to see a packed house for the annual Young Concert Artists gala at  Alice Tully Hall last night was a shot of serious optimism. Does the continued success of an organization whose raison d’etre is to champion and springboard the careers of young classical musicians portend a sea change, maybe? A slow tidal shift? Or does that simply reaffirm the eternal appeal of great art? All of the above, maybe?

The concert itself was great fun, a display of ferocious chops, and intuition, and joie de vivre, played to an audience reflecting the relative youth of most of the performers. The prospect of being able to see pianists Lise de la Salle amd Anne-Marie McDermott. violinists Ani Kafavian and Juliette Kang, bassist Xavier Foley. harpist Emmanuel Ceysson and the Zora String Quartet alongside veteran flutist Paula Robison and cello icon Fred Sherry – just to name a handful of the 23 former and current YCA roster members – together onstage is less likely than it might seem. Each has a busy solo, orchestral and chamber music career.

If pageantry could be genunely profound, it would be the version of Tschaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings played by YCA’s conductorless fifteen-piece all-star ensemble. With unbridled, fluttery joy balanced by more direct intonation and clear, uncluttered dynamic shifts, the group reveled in its balletesque riffs, drawing a straight line back to Mozart.

Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, backed by McDermott and the Zora String Quartet, followed a similarly straightforward trajectory from plaintiveness to a blaze of five-alarm drama in Ernest Chausson’s Chanson Perpetuelle. That vigorous sensibility took a turn in a more upbeat, triumphantly lilting direction with Ravel’s Introduction and  Allegro, played by a septet including Sherry, Kang, Robinson and  Ceysson along with violinist Paul Huang, violist Toby Appel and clarinetist Narek Arutyunian.

The program closed with a mashup of Scott Joplin, Liszt and John Philip Sousa arranged for piano eight hands, performed by de la Salle and McDermott with Gleb Ivanov and Yun-Chin Zhou. As completely over-the-top as the concept was, careening from one idiom to another with zero regard for segues, there’s no denying how much fun the four musicians were having while simply trying to maintain a semblance of tightness. Which testifies to the kind of outside-the-box thinking that might or might not be putting more and more young people in the seats. That question continues to bedevil everyone in the concert business these days – and it’s inspiring to see YCA coming up with some answers that are obviously working.

Lush, Epic, Hauntingly Cinematic Jazz from the Robert Sabin Dectet

Today’s Halloween album, streaming at Bandcamp, is Humanity Part II, released by bassist Robert Sabin and his dectet in 2015. The black-and-sepia cd packaging leaves no doubt about this lushly Lynchian musical reflection on the horrible things people do to each other There’s a dead woman lying in the woods on the front cover, silhouette of a guy going after his wife with an axe in the cd tray and a gloomy quote about loss and absence from Albert Camus’ La Peste on the inside cover flap.

These piece are epic – the shortest one is more than five minutes and the aptly titled concluding number, Leviathan, clocks in at almost eleven. The title track, a relentlessly enveloping rearrangement of Ennio Morricone’s theme to the John Carpenter film The Thing, opens the suite. Sabin’s bass and Jeremy Noller’s drums keep a calm, clenched-teeth suspense going beneath the band’s tectonically shifting sheets of sound, both tenor saxophonist Jason Rigby and guitarist Jesse Lewis reaching for postbop blitheness but quickly getting pulled down into the mist.

The ten-minute, Ingmar Bergman-inspired Through a Glass Darkly builds morosely out of a brooding guitar vamp. Ben Stapp proves that there can be noir hidden deep in the valves of a tuba, Rigby follows with a long, vividly downcast, smoke-tinted solo of his own and Sabin’s top-to-bottom, Gil Evans-like orchestration is deliciously uneasy. As is the way the guitar, then the bass, then the whole ensemble stalk Noller’s drum solo and make a carnivalesque mambo out of it. Gato Loco ought to cover this.

Sabin takes his inspiration for Scarecrow from the scene of a hanged man in the desert depicted in Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. A tensely circling bass theme and ambered, spacious horns lead to an enigmatic John Yao trombone solo as the band swings straightforwardly.

Ghost is a portrait of a house whose occupant has just died, a somber belltone pavane punctuated with artfully suspenseful use of space, moody horns leading to a pensive Rigby solo. Noller and Lewis team up for an allusively syncopated latin noir pulse, then back away.

Tenebre, inspired by Dario Argento’s cult film, opens with moodily circling syncopation, alto saxophonist Aaron Irwn and trumpet Matt Holman reaching to poke a hole in the grey clouds overhead. The bandleader’s solo swings morosely and then stalks as Leviathan rises from the depths toward macabrely cinematic heights, Irwin offering a sardonically contented wee-hours solo, a crowded club full of unsuspecting victims. Then Lewis hits his distortion pedal and bares his fangs! As the credits roll at the end, the monster gets away to ensure that there will be a sequel – we can hope, anyway.

One of the most lustrously dark and troubled albums of recent years, this could be the great lost Gil Evans record, or the soundtrack to a cosmopolitan David Lynch thriller yet to be made.

The Up-and-Coming Verona Quartet Bring a Vivid Program to MOMA Summergarden This Sunday

Among urbane hot-weather New York traditions, nothing beats a trip to MOMA Summergarden on a Sunday evening. The thematic programming that they used to have here has given way to a more eclectic series of acts. Doors open at 6 on the 54th Street side; the music starts at 8 and getting there on time is always a good idea. This Sunday, July 23, the auspicious young Verona Quartet, who got their start at Juilliard just a year ago, play US premieres by a global cast of contemporary composers: Japan’s Teizō Matsumura, Costa Rica;s Alejandro Cardona and Poland’s Elżbieta Sikora. Admission is free.

The quartet’s concert last month at WNYC’s Greene Space was a showcase for their close emotional attunement and versatility. The only questionable choice they made was the sequence of works. On one hand, it makes total sense to open with Shostakovich’s harrowing String Quartet No. 7 and then follow it with Ravel’s String Quartet in F, which is more physically taxing. And maybe the group didn’t want to send the crowd home on a down note – although the Ravel concludes enigmatically. Whatever the case, the program packed a wallop,

The Shostakovich is one of the most heartbreaking pieces of music ever written. It’s a requiem for the composer’s first wife, who left him, then he persuaded her to come back, then she left him again for keeps. As the quartet portrayed her, she was graceful and elegant…and fatally flawed. “If only…:” Is the central theme. Violinists Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violist Abigail Rojansky and cellist Warren Hagerty channeled that with a spare, poignant intensity, from its elegaic, balletesque introduction, through moody circles foreshadowing the danse macabre and eventual, sepulchral defeat that followed – and itself foreshadowed the hunted grimness of the composer’s next quartet.

Their performance of the Ravel was fueled by precise gearshifting between idioms – written on the cusp of late Romanticism and early Modernism, you can hear Cesar Franck’s calm amidst the Parisian bustle, but also Debussy’s Eureka moment when he saw the  gamelan for the first ttime.  The quartet simmered the balmy lustre in the opening movement, then made a meticulous, surgically precise run through the sharp, emphatic pizzicato of the second movement and the carnivalesquely waltzing variations that followed.

It was on the third movement that they really dug in. Ravel wrote this piece very generously – everybody gets time in the spotlight, and this is where the viola and cello get called on to lead the trail out of a revisitation of the summery first movement as it takes a turn in a far darker direction, and Rojansky and Hagerty both rose to the occasion. Likewise, Hagerty didn’t hold back as he anchored the shivery flurries and uneasy, often aching waltz of the concluding movement. The material this Sunday is completely different, but it’s fair to assume that the quartet will go just as deeply into it.