BANDCAMP DAILY: Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: October 2018
BANDCAMP DAILY: Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: October 2018
BY PETER MARGASAK
“A dazzling debut from this New York string quartet. This release collects five commissioned works from a variety of impressive composers, drawing upon tradition while also pushing beyond it. The recording opens with the bristling energy of Gabriella Smith’s ‘Carrot Revolution,’ melding percussive effects and bright scrapes with spry, shifting rhythms. Smith imagines a musical conversation between baroque, Irish fiddle, and Georgian folk music, blending disparate notions with a neatly controlled sprawl. Caroline Shaw’s ‘Blueprint’ builds from terse shards of Beethoven’s 6th quartet, breaking down the fragments in a granular way, and naturally reconstructing them in a dialogue of past and present that showcases a surprisingly effective post-modern spin. Yevgeniy Sharlat’s ‘RIPEFG’ is an homage to his late student Ethan Frederick Greene, capturing a kaleidoscope of emotions that accents the rapid movement of the piece with the unlikely coloration of melodica, an instrument Greene would always bring to lessons. The quartet also play two movements from Lembit Beecher’s chamber opera ‘Sophia’s Forest,’ which describes the thoughts of a nine-year-old emigrant fleeing a civil war. The album concludes with a dynamic, melodic three-movement delight by Paul Wiancko called ‘LIFT,’ which delights in the pure joy of contrapuntal possibilities for the string quartet.”