Not easy-listening music

ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET TAKES ON JOHN ADAMS

St. Lawrence String Quartet

Santa Fe is likely to be on a John Adams high this summer, when Santa Fe Opera’s production of his Doctor Atomic will invite attendees to muse on the Manhattan Project while looking out toward Los Alamos. Adams, who turned seventy-one just two weeks ago, has become one of America’s most acclaimed contemporary composers, but his reputation is based largely on his large-scale operas and symphonic works. Chamber music, not so much. In 1978, he essayed Wavemaker, a piece for the Kronos String Quartet, but he withdrew it and transformed it into a larger chamber work, his Shaker Loops for seven players. In 1994, he produced another piece for Kronos, John’s Book of Alleged Dances, a collection of 10 short movements that gradually staked a place as an entertaining classic.

A full-scale string quartet would not emerge for another 14 years, and it was inspired by his attending a concert by the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Geoff Nuttall, who has served as that foursome’s first violinist since its founding in 1989, remembered the evening well: “He went to the concert because we were playing the Alleged Dances, but when he came backstage afterward, it was our performance of Beethoven’s Op. 132 that he was really excited about.” That, Nuttall feels, provided the kernel of the idea for Adams’ First Quartet. He wrote it expressly for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which premiered it in 2008. At first glance, the piece seems out-of-balance: two movements, of which the first is very long (running beyond 20 minutes) and the second is comparatively short (at nine minutes). That opening movement, Nuttall said, “is really like a late Beethoven quartet. Basically, it’s a whole four-movement piece condensed into one movement, sort of like what Beethoven does in his Op. 131. And, like that piece, it runs a huge gamut emotionally. There are moments of total chaos, of groove and drive, but also music that is very calm. After that, the second movement is like a ride.”

The St. Lawrence String Quartet will perform Adams’ piece as the middle work on the program it gives at St. Francis Auditorium on Sunday, March 4, sponsored by Santa Fe Pro Musica. Appropriately, it will be heard in the wake of one of Beethoven’s late quartets — his Op. 135 — and it will be followed by Sibelius’ String Quartet, titled Voces intimae. Nuttall appreciates that Adams was challenging himself by working outside his comfort zone when he wrote the quartet: “He’s a master orchestrator, and composers who really rely on orchestration often have a harder time when they set out to write for this very intimate combination that is a string quartet.” Adams has acknowledged the same thing. “String quartet writing,” he has written, “is one of the most difficult challenges a composer can take on. Unless one is an accomplished string player and writes in that medium all the time — and I don’t know many these days who do — the demands of handling this extremely volatile and transparent instrumental medium can easily be humbling, if not downright humiliating.” He succeeded nonetheless, and he went on to write two further works for the St. Lawrence String Quartet: a concerto for string quartet and orchestra, titled Absolute Jest (2012), which incorporates very audible quotations from Beethoven’s symphonies and late quartets, and his Second Quartet (2014), also in two movements and again referencing late Beethoven, particularly his Op. 111 Piano Sonata and his Diabelli Variations.

Nuttall described the First Quartet as taxing from the performer’s perspective. “We play it a lot, and it is now easier than it was. With a lot of new music, you get to program a piece only once or twice. Luckily, because John is famous, we have been able to program this piece often. When we first looked at it, it appeared simple, but its difficulties emerged as we worked on it, including a lot of polyrhythms that are tricky. It’s the kind of music that, if you get off the train, it’s really hard to get back on. It’s very John: Everything is playable, but the music leaps around, high and low, presenting intonation challenges, and the rhythmic complexities make it hard to get things tight. In that sense, it’s sort of like learning the Bartók quartets. Adams’ First Quartet is dissonant, sometimes violent, long; it’s not like this is easy-listening music.” For the St. Lawrence players, part of the excitement is that Adams is given to changing details of a piece as it gets lived in. “John is a tinkerer, up to a point,” Nuttall said. “Just a few days ago, in Berkeley, we worked with him on this piece, and even then he was reconsidering a couple of pitches.”

details

St. Lawrence String Quartet 3 p.m. Sunday, March 4 St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave. $12-$80; ticketssantafe.org, 505-988-1234

“String quartet writing,” John Adams has written, “is one of the most difficult challenges a composer can take on.”