Andean Walkabout – Del Sol String Quartet

The Del Sol String Quartet has spent a quarter-century now proving that the string quartet — that most conservative and interior of chamber-music mediums, the vehicle of Haydn’s wit and Beethoven’s late metaphysics — can still go anywhere and speak any language it likes. This San Francisco-based group plays like it believes that completely. Not politely multicultural, not academic. Alive.

The disc opens with Gabriela Lena Frank, and rightly so, because Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout is the piece here most likely to convert a skeptic. Frank’s biography reads like a UN roll call — Peruvian-Chinese mother, Lithuanian-Jewish father, raised in Berkeley — and her music never lets you forget that she came to Andean folklore as a fascinated outsider making a pilgrimage rather than someone writing from inherited memory. That distance is not a weakness. It gives her the freedom to stylize: panpipe tremolos rendered as harmonics high on the E string, the keening of hired mourners (the llorona tradition) turned into sustained microtonal slides that made me put my fork down at dinner and just listen. The finale, a moto perpetuo evoking strummed guitars, is exhilarating in the Del Sol’s hands — fast, gritty, unafraid of an ugly accent when the music wants one.

Lou Harrison remains the great American original of this generation’s grandparents, and it’s worth remembering he was writing gamelan-inflected chamber music decades before “world music” was a marketing category — studying with Cowell and Cage, copying Ives’s manuscripts for money, living openly with his partner Bill Colvig in Aptos while American concert life mostly pretended composers like him didn’t exist. The String Quartet Set is vintage Harrison: magpie eclecticism held together by real contrapuntal discipline. The slow movement builds a hushed, almost liturgical arch from a medieval German chant tune, intoned with a plainness that recalls Harrison’s lifelong Esperantist idealism — music as a universal, borrowed language. Elsewhere he tips his hat to Rameau with a courtly, dotted-rhythm dance, and the finale marches off in mock-Janissary regalia, cymbals implied by sul ponticello scrape. The “Plaint” is exactly what Harrison said it was: everybody complains a little. It’s wry, tender, over almost before it starts.

José Evangelista’s Spanish Garland — twelve folk tunes strung together like a rosary — is deceptively modest on paper and riotous in reading. Evangelista, Valencia-born, Montreal-based, is a heterophony specialist; he doesn’t harmonize these tunes so much as let four voices sing the same melody slightly out of alignment, the way an actual village band would, fiddle and bagpipe and voice never quite together, never quite apart. It sounds rough in exactly the right way. The Del Sol resists the temptation to tidy it up. By the time the Galician tune arrives at the close — modal, droning, unmistakably kin to Celtic music by way of the old Atlantic trade routes — you understand why Spain’s musical identity was always a fiction imposed from Madrid.

Reza Vali’s Nayshaboorák draws its title from Nishapur, the Persian city of Omar Khayyám, and its material from the dastgah system of Persian classical music — those intricate modal families with their microtonal inflections that Western notation can only approximate. Vali, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon and has spent decades translating Persian musical grammar into Western instrumental idiom, writes glissandi and quarter-tones here that never feel like exoticism bolted onto a string quartet chassis. They feel structural. The Del Sol’s intonation in the bent pitches is remarkably secure — this is fiendishly difficult to tune in an ensemble, and they don’t fudge it.

Elena Kats-Cher200nin’s “Fast Blue Village 2” closes things out — five minutes of Uzbek-inflected moto perpetuo, dizzying and a little manic, like a village wedding filmed at the wrong speed. Kats-Chernin, Uzbekistan-born and now an Australian institution (her “Eliza Aria” turned up in a Lloyds Bank commercial and made her briefly famous well outside new-music circles), knows exactly how long a good idea should last. She doesn’t overstay.

Sonics are close and warm, string tone caught with enough rosin-dust immediacy that you can practically hear bow hair. If you want a reference point for the Del Sol’s commitment to non-Western-classical repertoire, their earlier Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Chen Yi recordings covered some of this same ground with less abandon than they show here.

Eighty minutes, five composers, four continents worth of borrowed material — and not a condescending bar in the lot. I’d call this one of the year’s essential chamber discs, full stop.