Momenta Quartet Concert at Music of the Americas Is Reviewed by Cadenza NYC
Momenta Quartet Concert at Music of the Americas Is Reviewed by Cadenza NYC
The concert celebrated "the 150th birthday of one of America’s true originals, Charles Ives," says the website about the concert at Americas Society.
Something has been missing from concert stages. Eighteenth- and nineteenth century music, distilled to what feels like an increasingly repetitive roster of warhorses, dominates programming, while twentieth century — especially American — composers are too rarely featured.
Thankfully, I learned about the Momenta Festival, the Momenta Quartet’s series of four member-curated concerts celebrating the 150th birthday of one of America’s true originals, Charles Ives. The third concert in the Momenta Festival IX: Ives at 150 series, in the grand salon of the Americas Society’s neo-Federalist Park Avenue townhouse, was called Found. Curated by violinist Alex Shiozaki, Ives’s Piano Trio was rescued from relative obscurity along with chamber music by two other composers recently rediscovered: Julián Carrillo and Florence Price.
The superb Momenta Quartet — violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Alex Shiozaki, violist Stephanie Griffin, and cellist Michael Haas — are recording a complete cycle of the quartets of Mexican composer Julián Carrillo, and opened the evening with Carrillo’s String Quartet No. 8. This late-career composition from 1959 makes prominent use of Carrillo’s specialty, microtones, which the composer dubbed “The Thirteenth Sound.” Incorporating quarter-tones — the notes in between the piano’s black and white keys, that is — into an eclectic, advanced harmonic language makes for a rich, complex means of expression, and demands technique of the highest order to make convincing...