Higdon Chamber Works – Lark Quartet

Somewhere in the last decade Jennifer Higdon stopped being merely fashionable and started being good, and this disc is the proof I’d been waiting for.

I’ll admit an old bias here. blue cathedral has been done nearly to death by American orchestras looking to prove their commitment to living composers without unduly disturbing the subscribers, and I’ve sat through enough performances of it to find the piece’s charms thinning with repetition — pretty surfaces, a certain undeniable skill in orchestration, but not much underneath that rewards a second listen, let alone a tenth. Chamber music turns out to be a different proposition. Take away the massed strings and the wind machine effects, and what’s left is a composer who has to reckon with counterpoint, with the friction of four individual voices rubbing against each other in real time. Higdon rises to it.

An Exaltation of Larks opens the program. Despite the title’s coincidental overlap with the ensemble performing it — the Lark Quartet had nothing to do with its commission — the piece has an open-prairie, Coplandesque optimism that suits American string writing at its best. Higdon writes virtuosically for all four players; there’s no passenger part here, no cellist relegated to droning root notes while the violins have the fun. The harmonies stay open, almost bare at times, fifths and octaves left to ring in a way that feels specifically American, out of Copland by way of Barber’s Adagio-adjacent lyricism. Melodic fragments surface and vanish before you can quite hold onto them, which is a virtue for a while and then, around the eight-minute mark, starts to feel like padding. I found myself waiting for the material to commit to something. It doesn’t, not quite, until the last five minutes, when the rhythmic drive kicks back in and the piece finds its footing again and rides it to a satisfying close. Ten minutes of real substance stretched to sixteen. Not fatal, but noticeable.

Then: Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams, for string quartet and left-hand piano. Here things get considerably more interesting.

This was written for Gary Graffman, and Graffman’s presence on this release carries weight beyond the merely contractual. He has been the dean of one-handed pianism in America since the hand injury — focal dystonia, as we now understand it — ended his two-handed career in 1979, and in the decades since he’s commissioned an entire shadow repertoire: Bolcom, Rorem, Leon Kirchner, now Higdon. His playing here has the authority of someone who long ago stopped thinking of the left hand as a compromise and started thinking of it as its own instrument, with its own color and its own possibilities for bravura. Higdon writes for him with real understanding of that history. The fast movements have snap and wit — the opening movement bounces along with a playfulness that put me in mind of Prokofiev’s concertos, that same quicksilver alternation between the puckish and the percussive. But it’s the slow movements where Higdon does her best work on this disc, better even than the meditative stretches of the Larks quartet, which by comparison can feel a touch generic. There’s a movement here depicting a swarm of insects — I won’t pretend to remember which poet supplied the image — that is genuinely unsettling, all skittering harmonics and clattering col legno, as jangling and claustrophobic as the real thing buzzing at your ear on a July evening. This is Higdon writing actual modern dissonance, not decorative dissonance. It’s the strongest music on the record until the finale of the last work.

Which brings us to Light Refracted, the worst title of the three and, I’d argue, the best piece Higdon has given us.

It begins with the clarinet alone, unaccompanied, in a long, unhurried line that the other instruments gradually join. Todd Palmer, who carries an enormous share of the expressive burden here, plays it with the kind of breath control and tonal shading that turns a simple melodic ascent into something quietly devastating. The whole opening span has an almost Coplandesque hush to it, spacious and lonely, the sound of a solitary voice in a very large room. It goes on for a good while, and unlike the stretches I found thin in the Larks quartet, this one never overstays. Then, without much warning, it’s answered by a perpetuum mobile finale of nearly the opposite character: brilliant, breathless, moto perpetuo writing that I gather was commissioned separately, as a kind of energetic chaser to the original slow piece, by performers who apparently felt the meditation needed a companion. The contrast is bracing rather than jarring. Blair McMillen partners Palmer here with real alertness, matching him gesture for gesture in music that demands split-second ensemble.

The Lark Quartet plays all of this with the polish you’d expect from an ensemble that has built its whole identity around new American music. They gave us both of Aaron Jay Kernis’s extraordinary string quartets, and have carried commissions from William Bolcom, Paul Moravec, Peter Schickele. Intonation is clean even in the thorniest passages, ensemble is tight without sounding drilled, and there’s an evident commitment to the material that comes only from players who believe in what they’re performing, not merely executing a job. Graffman’s contribution deserves particular note. One-handed playing this fluent is not merely a technical stunt, it’s musicianship of a very high order, and he never lets you forget it.

I came into this disc a skeptic and left it, somewhat to my own surprise, a convert.