Guitar Quartet Works – Minneapolis Guitar Quartet

Four guitars, plucking away in unison or against one another, ought by rights to produce a wall of undifferentiated twang. It doesn’t happen here. The Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, now well into its fourth decade and seasoned on everything from Dowland to Piazzolla, has developed a sound so internally varied, so alert to color, that you sometimes forget you’re listening to four of the same instrument at all.

That matters especially on a disc like this one, where the whole enterprise depends on composers treating the guitar quartet not as a novelty but as an organism with real lungs.

Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Ghetto Strings opens the program and steals a good deal of its thunder. Roumain, trained at Michigan and Juilliard, is a violinist by background and a composer who has never been shy about letting hip-hop and club music seep into his concert works. He writes a Harlem movement that struts rather than saunters, all clipped rhythmic hits and sly syncopation, the guitars articulating almost like a drum kit with strings attached. Then Detroit. The Motor City movement slows everything to a kind of hypnotic idle, minimalist patterning that never quite repeats itself exactly, cross-rhythms interlocking so quietly you don’t notice the machinery until it’s already carried you somewhere else. Haiti closes the piece with modal inflections and a rhythmic lilt that never tips into pastiche — Roumain, whose family has Haitian roots, earns this one honestly. It’s a wonderful piece. I’d go further than “highly enjoyable.” There’s real craft in how the transitions are engineered, how each city gets its own harmonic fingerprint without the whole thing feeling like a suite of postcards.

David Evan Thomas’s Thrum is the odd one out, structurally speaking, and I mean that as praise. Thomas, a Minnesota composer with a long habit of writing precisely for the musicians in front of him, builds something closer to a concerto for four equal soloists than a quartet piece proper. Material is tossed hand to hand; nobody is allowed to settle into an accompanying role for long. The slow movement is the heart of it. The composer’s own description, “part philosophy lesson, part stroll in a garden of little bells,” sounds twee on paper but plays as genuinely luminous, harmonics chiming against sustained tones with a bell-like decay that these four players clearly relish. The finale tucks a fugue inside its sleeve, light-fingered, almost a joke, the kind of contrapuntal writing that winks rather than lectures. Bach it isn’t trying to be, and thank goodness.

Van Stiefel’s Cinema Castaneda is the disc’s most ambitious reach. Its ten continuous movements, drawing on cowboy ballads, ranchera inflections, imagined frontier landscapes, ask the quartet to do things guitar quartets don’t usually do: sing, for one, with all the vulnerability that entails when trained instrumentalists open their mouths instead of plucking a string. It works, oddly. Stiefel came up as a classical guitarist himself, and he understands the instrument’s physical vocabulary intimately enough to distort it convincingly: harmonics smeared into near-vocal glissandi, sudden drops into near-silence, dynamics stretched thin as wire. The cinematic label is no marketing gesture. This score thinks in wide shots and jump cuts.

Gao Hong’s Guangxi Impression, with the composer herself on pipa, closes matters in a different sonic world entirely. The pipa’s dry, percussive attack cuts against the guitars’ rounder resonance in a way that’s genuinely thrilling on first hearing, though I found myself wanting a slightly more spacious recorded acoustic to let the two timbres breathe apart before they merge. Minor complaint. The blend, when it comes, is beautifully judged.

Is there a rival release of any of this repertoire? Not really. This is new music written largely for this ensemble, which makes comparison beside the point and the performances, by definition, definitive. What strikes me most, listening straight through, is how little these four pieces resemble one another, and how completely the Minneapolis players inhabit each idiom without ever losing their own collective identity: a warm, precise, unfussy sound that never calls attention to artistry for its own sake. Contemporary American chamber music this engaging, this well played, doesn’t come along often enough. Seek it out.