Kats-Chernin: Blue Silence – Acacia Quartet

Somebody at Vexations840 owes Elena Kats-Chernin a small percentage of whatever runs through the till, given how often her name appears on that label’s release sheet these days. Twenty tracks, most of them barely outlasting a good espresso, all filed under the same title as a disc that came out last spring on Tall Poppies — a title that happened, on that occasion, to belong to just one piece among many. Now it’s stretched over a whole shelf’s worth of chamber music. Whether the composer minds sharing her most atmospheric title with an entire catalog of her own output is not something I am in a position to answer, though I suspect she has bigger things to worry about.

What she does not have to worry about is whether this music communicates. It does, instantly, disarmingly, sometimes almost too easily. Kats-Chernin trained in the Soviet pedagogical tradition before landing in Australia by way of study with Helmut Lachenmann in Hannover, a lineage that would suggest thorny modernism, spiky rows, the whole apparatus of postwar difficulty. None of that survived the journey intact. What emerged instead, especially from the mid-1990s onward, was a voice indebted to cabaret, to silent-film scoring, to the tango-inflected melancholy of Piazzolla and to the pulse-driven repetitions of Philip Glass, but warmer than either, less prone to brooding, quicker to smile. The “Eliza Aria,” which anybody who has ever owned a television during a Lloyds Bank advertising campaign will recognize whether they know it or not, is Exhibit A. It appears here too, transcribed for quartet, its long looping tune passed from first violin to cello with a wistfulness that almost, almost, earns back the goodwill worn thin by a decade of Classic FM rotation.

The Acacia Quartet play it straight, no apology, no ironic distance, which is exactly right. Lisa Stewart’s first violin has a bright, slightly reedy tone that suits Kats-Chernin’s melodic writing better than a plusher sound would. This is music that wants clarity of line, not Romantic upholstery. Miyee Clohessy’s second violin threads through the inner voices with real attentiveness; you notice her especially in the syncopated dance numbers, where the composer likes to hand the groove to an unexpected player just to keep everybody honest. Stefan Duwe’s viola has weight without murkiness. And Anna Martin-Scrase’s cello anchors the pizzicato ostinati that recur throughout this program with a rhythmic discipline that never once slides into metronomic stiffness. No small feat, since motoric repetition is precisely where lesser ensembles go dead.

Most of these pieces, it should be said, did not begin life as string quartets at all. Kats-Chernin calls them “re-versions”: theater music, film cues, chamber pieces for other combinations, reworked for the quartet’s particular blend of intimacy and bite. There’s also a suite drawn from Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, which sits in this company rather like a guest who wandered in from another party: courtly, unhurried, faintly bemused by the tangos and the toe-tapping ostinati surrounding it. It works, oddly. Kats-Chernin’s arranging hand is light enough not to smother the Baroque bones underneath.

Is there a danger of surfeit? Twenty tracks of concentrated color and dance rhythm, even executed this deftly, can start to blur, one bright miniature after another, the ear’s palate not quite refreshed enough between courses. I’d have welcomed a slower movement or two of real stillness, something to let the silence in “Blue Silence” actually mean something. But this is a quibble against abundance, not emptiness. As a document of everything Kats-Chernin has so far written for string quartet, and she has said more may come, it is complete, idiomatically played, and recorded with a close, dry immediacy that suits the music’s directness: you can hear bow changes, the occasional breath, the rosin-dust intimacy of a rehearsal room rather than a cathedral. Not repertoire for the ages, perhaps. But honest, communicative, and better crafted than its charm lets on. Recommended, particularly to listeners who think contemporary music is obligated to hurt.