Brentano String Quartet, 19:30 Sunday 09 March

[amcluesent]

Mostly of interest for Steve Mackey: One Red Rose (UK première) The music aspires to honor the memory of President Kennedy and acknowledge the tragedy endured by his family, friends, and country.

The piece is in three movements:

1. Five Short Studies
2. Fugue and Fantasy
3. Anthem and Aria

“Heartfelt in effect and fascinating in detail, One Red Rose showed Mr. Mackey’s expert grasp of the string quartet idiom: not only the timbres, textures and expressive effects of its component instruments, but also the genre’s distinctive capacities for parity, transparency and discernible impact of disparate, simultaneous threads.”
— New York Times

Very clever of them to keep playing while making all them shoes.

[edashtav]

Was it Steve Mackey or Steve Macbartok ?

[COLOR=#262626][FONT=arial]Mostly of interest for Steve Mackey: One Red Rose (UK première)

True. Well, the Brentano quartet performed this new piece with aplomb and elegance. Everything was in place, and the neat touches of chromium plating made the work sparkle like an American limousine rolling off the production line. Steve Mackey knows his stuff: the piece sounded, tasted and felt like a string quartet. But was it real, did it have substance, was it new?

Sadly, I answer with a stentorian voice,"No".

This was yet another beautifully tailored,synthetic product from the soft groves of American Academia. What was the composer doing writing a memorial to an American tragedy fifty years on? What was the stimulus - a real, passionate interest in the event? Now to my mind, that would produce a work red in tooth and claw. Steve was only 7 went Kennedy was assassinated. He remembers the turmoil at a national level - and his his mother's tears at a personal one. A supposed "dialectic" between the personal tragedy (chaos) and the national need for form, protocol, & continuity (control) informs his score. Sorry, Steve, but I found your piece to be "studied"; to be the (im)passive result of the extensive research to which you've alluded.

There were moments when I thought Mackey was going to say something new. At one point, I observed that he was toying not with a theme, but something far more 3-D, perhaps it deserved the name of a sound object. But, it dissolved into its linear (thematic) components. In another thread, ts has invoked the concept of Macbartok as a sobriquet for Erik Chisholm (it has been applied to other Scottish composers, such as Ronald Center, too). I found that MacKey was infested with Macbartok. Yes, it was decorated with more modern string techniques and derived a deal from the world of popular music, but, at its heart, was the musical world that Bartok formed, used and understood. Bartok died ten years before Mackey was born. For Mackey to say something of significance, IMHO, he needs not to decorate his scores some ear-tickling modernisms but to confront current ideas at a structurally significant level. His modus operandi is not an dialectic with contemporary musical concepts but a raid on the museum of former solutions.

The piece had virtues, it did develop, it went on a "journey" ( & so does the even more trivial music of Michael Torke) and it was finely wrought. But... this listener cannot forgive its lack of real creativity, & the absence of the the shock of the new.

An old-fashioned piece with nought to frighten the Great and the Good horses across the States who paraded for the 50th anniversary of the death of one of their greatest leaders.

Sometimes, I worry that we in the U.K. don't have access to the personal and corporate foundations that abound in the USA and which sink millions of dollars into commissioning and programming "new" scores. Having heard MacKey piece and studied his back-catalogue, I've come to the conclusion, that it may be better ( at least for listeners) that British composers often exist in penury.

P.S. Beware the composer who "talks the talk".

[teamsaint]

Very Interesting thoughts, Ed. A Composers Corporate Comfort zone? some people may have thoughts on that !!

I haven't heard last nights show, but did catch a bit of the Lunchtime concert (on the car radio) today, when according to SMP, the Quartet were "mesmerising". But then most things on daytime R3 are mesmerising, wonderful, superlative, sensational, whatever.

I hope my use of " MacBartok" doesn't offend. It is quite widely used for Chisholm, and in an affectionate and respectful way I think.

[DracoM]

And 'less is more' the Mackey wasn't. Prolix and derivative, frankly.
Brentano Qt skilled and concentrated, well worth a listen. Today's Razumovsky 2 was good jolly stuff.

[edashtav]

And 'less is more' the Mackey wasn't. Prolix and derivative, frankly.
Brentano Qt skilled and concentrated, well worth a listen. Today's Razumovsky 2 was good jolly stuff.

You're correct to emphasise the excellence of the Brentano quartet, DracoM . They did everything possible to breathe life & excitement into Mackey's corpse. Time for it to be put to rest - in a grave marked by One Red Rose.

There's nowt wrong with MacBartok, ts, it conveys a lot in a punchy way. A time there was when membership of such a club was more honorable and less off-putting than being in the British Cow-Pat School of Music.