The Next Festival Strings conducted by Peter Askim, with Kronos Quartet, June 12, 2025
Program:
Pascal Le Boeuf, “Transition Behavior” (2023)
inti Figgis-Vizueta, “music by yourself” (2025)
Jan Radzynski, from “Serenade for Strings” (2000)
Peter Askim, “Songs My Mother Taught Me” (2025)
Terry Riley, from “The Sands” (1991), with Kronos Quartet
Jungyoon Wie, “Starlings” (2025), with Kronos Quartet
During its 50 years, the Kronos Quartet has redefined the image of what a string quartet can be. Rather than curating a traditional repertoire in a dignified or even sclerotic manner, like groups of the past, Kronos has blown open the possibilities for quartets by offering an edgy, contemporary identity not only in appearance (more punk rock than black tie) but in its policy of commissioning and performing new works from an international array of composers including the New York “downtown” school (Terry Riley and Philip Glass among them); transcriptions of jazz, pop, and non-Western music; and collaborations with a heterogeneous collection of performers. At this point, their example has inspired a number of other fine groups. The Kronos Foundation’s website aptly describes it as practicing “a living art form that responds to the people and issues of our time.” On Thursday, June 12, it continued to validate this description despite its half-century in business, with its founding first violinist David Harrington still in place, along with three new colleagues filling out the ensemble.
The Next Festival of Emerging Artists also has its eyes on the future. An annual event founded by composer-conductor Peter Askim in 2013, it brings together young like-minded string players and cutting-edge composers for a week of intensive preparation followed by a pair of performances, first in Chatham, N.Y., and then in New York City. This year’s program included four recent works along with two older ones: one movement from “Serenade” (“Tarantella”) by Jan Radzynski (born 1950) and one section of a much longer work, “Sands,” by Terry Riley, who is celebrating his 90th birthday this year. Many scores on this program ask the performers to participate in the creative process through partial improvisation practices, making decisions through an extended rehearsal process afforded by the festival’s week-long preparation period. Each composition offered its own unique challenges to the group of very talented young professionals. They utilized varying configurations and stage setups resulting in unique sonorities for each work. The quartet joined the ensemble for the final two works, forming a “concerto grosso” setup in which the smaller and larger groups conversed with each other.
The most traditional works on the program were Askim’s and Radzynski’s—the latter, not coincidentally, is the former’s mentor and friend. Radzynski’s “Tarantella” riffed on the Italian dance form, creatively morphing its breezy energy into increasingly hazy and surreal moods, perhaps reflecting the influence of the venom that the dance was designed to counteract. The process of warping its traditional materials was occasionally ironic and disorienting but ultimately allowed the young players a virtuosic opportunity resulting in high spirits all around.
In his prefacing remarks, Askim linked his instrumental “Songs My Mother Taught Me” to two vocal settings of Adolf Hedyuk’s lyrics (which were printed in the program): those of Dvorak and Ives. Askim’s composition retained the wistful and sentiment-laden mood of those songs and was composed as a tribute to his own mother’s “compassion, humility, and kindness” in an elegiac mood suggesting that these attributes are of “an age long gone by.” The musical language was pandiatonic, using notes drawn primarily from a single scale in sometimes dense combinations. The result was an expressive saturation of string sound, akin to parts of Aaron Copland’s late “Nonet for Strings.”
A more recent work with roots in the past was Le Boeuf’s jazz-inspired “Transition Behavior,” which began the program. Its use of motor rhythms, obstinate repeated notes, plucked accents, complex cross rhythms, and percussive use of the wood of the bow on the string resulted in a somewhat retro sound that reminded me of Bernard Herrmann’s score to “Psycho” (1960). Its brevity and high energy made it an appropriate and attention-grabbing opener.
It was followed by a completely different experience, “music by yourself,” inti Figgis-Vizueta’s invitation to solitary, meditative listening. Composed for Kronos, the version for string orchestra expands the original range of available sounds and textures. Much in the score is left up to individual performers, and the conductor’s role is to shape the overall sound through expressive gestures rather than beating time. The ensemble changed its seating arrangement for this work, with mixed groups of instruments sitting together. This arrangement allows more freedom of action for the individual players and promotes intensive listening by both performers and the audience. The long, sustained sonorities were constantly shifting in subtle and gentle ways, ending with a gradual fadeout on the high harmonics of all instruments.
Figgis-Vizueta’s music has been heard in Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music among many significant music venues. Her mentors include Marcos Balter (see my review of Claire Chase’s Learning Institute concert), George Lewis, and Tanya Leon among others, and her unique aesthetic owes something to the spirit of her Quichua (Ecuadorian indigenous) forbears. The resulting stylistic profile is unique, mysterious, and spiritual in a way that each listener can relate to in their own way.
Terry Riley’s “The Sands” is the first movement of a longer 1991 piece commissioned by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie. It was composed as an immediate and angry response to the first Gulf War; Riley is a committed pacifist, and the work reflects the bellicosity of that event as well as the vehemence of Riley’s response. He claims it was composed as an improvisation in a single night; for its performance, kettledrums were added to the string ensemble. The music is built from a tune in the Phrygian mode (the exotic-sounding one, suggestive of a Middle Eastern milieu) that acts as an ostinato which is overlaid with other high-energy materials. The “concertino” of the string quartet initiated echo effects with the “ripieno” (referring to the smaller and larger groupings of a concerto gross) leading to an affecting violin solo performed by David Harrington. The work effectively conveyed the rage, dismay, and feeling of resistance of the composer in response to yet another war, sentiments that have not aged in the intervening 34 years.
The youthful composer Jungwoon Wie introduced “Starlings” by briefly stating that her artistic goal is to create music that is “easy, intelligent, and beautiful.” The inspirational image was a flock of starlings turning and wheeling together, forming ever-changing cloud shapes, a sight at which the composer and many have marveled. The phenomenon of an entire multitude taking an immediate cue from one individual and following suit is expressed through the use of a short, three-bar melody and subjecting it to an ingenious variety of overlapping variations, producing a surprisingly sustained developing musical scenario. With or without the visual image, the music succeeded in capturing the experience of continuous reconfiguration of simple materials, enhanced by a central viola solo evoking birdsong.
It was encouraging to see a sold-out audience of mixed age groups at PS21 for an evening of contemporary music that might be anticipated as challenging. Indeed it offered new, varied, and innovative musical experiences along with more familiar moments, but importantly, the expressive intentions of all the composers were immediately accessible, thanks in no small part to the energy and talents of the performers who acted as full creative partners to the composers. For that mission alone, the Next Festival justifies a long-continuing existence. The many resultant benefits for audiences simply reinforce that hope.
