United States Various: Ensemble Connect. Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York, 10.2.2025. (RP)
Schubert – ‘Quartettsatz’ in C minor D.703
Katherine Balch – ‘musica spolia’ (arr. for chamber ensemble), ‘musica nuvola’
Berio – ‘Ricorrenze’ for Wind Quintet
Beethoven – Septet in E-flat major Op.20
Ensemble Connect served a delectable musical feast for its February concert. Schubert was the amuse-bouche, with two tasty works by a composer of today, Katherine Balch, as starters. An avant-garde piece by Luciano Berio was the zen-like nouvelle cuisine entree, followed by lyrical Beethoven for dessert. The result was a fascinating and satisfying repast.
Schubert’s ‘Quartettsatz’ was performed by violinists Isabelle Ai Durrenberger and Rubén Rengel, violist Ramón Carrero-Martinez and cellist Frankie Carr. It is the only movement Schubert completed of a string quartet that he began at 23. The Ensemble Connect quartet played the dramatic opening with a fiery urgency, soon displaced by Durrenberger’s elegant silvery sound in the ethereal second theme. Carr’s incisive cello punctuated the piece’s more lyrical passages, which ended with the four players returning to the intensity of the opening measures in the closing section.
American composer Katherine Balch’s music is characterized by its use of found sounds and a sense of playfulness. One glance at the percussion set up for the performance of her ‘musica spolia’ and ‘musica nuvola’ gave that away. The percussion kit contained bubble wrap, a crumbled piece of paper, a metal can, a wine bottle, a tray of water and a spray bottle.
Originally composed in 2021 for flute, violin, percussion and piano, Balch arranged ‘musica spolia’ for two flutes, oboe, clarinet, percussion and bass on commission for Ensemble Connect. The new companion piece, ‘musica nuvola’, was also a Carnegie Hall commission.
When she lived in Rome, Balch was inspired to compose ‘music spolia’ by things she encountered on her walks through the city, such as vines spilling out of walls, statues and ornate decorations on ancient monuments. Balch sensed an energy in these things, and she translated it into sound.
The piece ‘musica nuvola’ is completely different in texture and harmony than ‘music spolia’. Rather than the fireworks display of short, fleeting sounds in the latter, ‘musica nuvola’ begins with one long, unified line that splinters into contrapuntal dialogue. It is dedicated to Balch’s friend, the composer and pianist Sarah Gibson, who died in 2024 at 38. Balch says the piece ‘tiptoes into the whimsy and playfulness of Sarah’s compositional world’, a space in which Balch is clearly at home as well.
Flutists Catherine Boyack and Anjali Shinde, oboist Joseph Jordan, bass clarinetist Jasmina Spiegelberg, percussionist Oliver Xu and contrabassist Marguerite Cox performed both works.
They embraced the colorful frenzy of ‘musica nuvola’ with its stops and starts and hairpin turns. In contrast, ‘musica nuvola’ began with dark tremolos in the vibraphone, followed by a meandering, questioning oboe solo. Both scores abound in musical colors, but the eye and ear were repeatedly drawn to Xu, whether he was popping bubble wrap or conjuring sound from water.
Ensemble Connect’s programming of ‘Ricorrenze’ for Wind Quintet was part of Carnegie Hall’s observance of the Italian avant-garde composer’s hundredth birthday. Berio composed it as a 60th-birthday tribute to his friend Pierre Boulez, with whom he shared the birth year 1925. In Italian, ‘ricorrenze’ means both anniversary and recurrence, and this performance encompassed both senses of the word with its multiple layers of association between its composer and the dedicatee.
In ‘Ricorrenze’, Berio turned to nature for inspiration, but nothing so green and lush as Balch encountered in Rome. Berio instead used the pockmarked, arid moonscape of Jean Dubuffet’s lithograph ‘Terre chaleureuse’ as his reference point. Click here to see Dubuffet’s lithograph. The visual is worth a thousand words.
The trees that Berio saw in Dubuffet’s lithograph were isolated yet interlinked in his imagination. To achieve this visually in performance, the composer instructed the players to stand two meters apart on the stage facing the audience. Flutist Catherine Boyack, oboist Joseph Jordan, clarinetist Yasmina Spiegelberg, bassoonist Marty Tung and hornist Ryan Dresen followed Berio’s dictate, and imposed cohesion on this challenging, austere music, playing it with precision and a touch of humor. Some brilliant exchanges between Spiegelberg and Dresen spiced up the performance, as did a well-articulated unison trill. The final chord of the piece resonated with the sense of a challenge well met.
Beethoven composed his Septet in E-flat major in 1799, at the end of his Early Period when he was finding his place in Viennese musical society. The Septet’s popularity was so great that he rued that the score had not been burned.
This stylish and lively performance by Spiegelberg, Tung, Dresen, Durrenberger, Carrero-Martinez, Carr and Cox was a crowd-pleaser. Beethoven showcased the clarinet in the Septet, and Spiegelberg made the most of the opportunity. Hornist Dresen impressed too with both tone and style. As Schubert did for the opening piece, Beethoven also wrote some lovely music for the violin. Durrenberger instilled those lyrical melodies and the cadenza in the final movement with beauty and emotion.
Rick Perdian