The Orion Quartet Debuts a Del Tredici Quintet
On journeying to the core of a newly commissioned work
Photo by Lois Greenfield
CREATING MUSICAL MIRACLES: Cellist Timothy Eddy (left), violinist Todd Phillips, violist Steven Tenenbom, and violinist Daniel Phillips.
According to the New York Times, composer David Del Tredici describes writing his first string quartet as a year spent "sitting joylessly at the piano." Then one morning he woke up and said, "It has got to be a pleasure or I won't do this anymore.
"I thought I was going crazy," Del Tredici continued. "I would just jot down everything that came to mind—a kind of musical diary—sometimes only one whole note, or a phrase. I gave up consecutive thinking. I gave up composing at the piano, which completely changed my style, until I could feel an actual cellular change in my surrender to the process. The first composition I put together this way, I Hear an Army [for soprano and string quartet], was like a little mosaic."
In 2002, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio premiered Del Tredici's Grand Trio at the University of Maryland, commissioned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of KLR. The Times' Allan Kozinn described the nearly 40-minute work as "in the tradition (and mostly in the language) of late Romanticism."
Writing in Strings about a 2005 DaPonte String Quartet performance of Del Tredici's String Quartet of 2003, Daniel Felsenfeld noted: "The piece might have been composed by a cartoon Brahms on a psychedelic drug—and this is meant as the highest possible compliment!"
Del Tredici has composed yet another string piece, Magyar Madness, this time for the Orion String Quartet. To witness the commissioning of a new work is a chance to observe a miraculous process of discovery. A chamber ensemble has the opportunity to deliver first performances with a distinctly personal touch. That personal touch—and the miracles, magic, and madness that can accompany the process—makes an enormous difference in an audience's receptivity and enjoyment of the work.
Creating musical miracles is something that the Orion Quartet—violinist brothers Daniel and Todd Phillips, violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Timothy Eddy—has been accomplishing for more than 20 years. Acclaimed for excellent teaching, eloquent performances of mainstream repertoire, and championing new music, the hard-working Orions serve as quartet-in-residence at both the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and New York's Mannes College of Music.
As of the current season, they also have been appointed resident quartet at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music. Their current season, which includes a retrospective at the 92nd Street Y and highly anticipated Beethoven cycles in New York and Santa Fe (accompanied by the recent first release in a recorded Beethoven cycle on the Koch label), has also featured the first performances of commissions from Del Tredici and Lowell Liebermann. I recently kept track of how rehearsals for the Del Tredici work were going through frequent phone conversations with the participants.
I was delighted to hear that it was the miraculous process all over again.
The Del Tredici commission is one of the most important the Orions have yet had. The composer is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose Nonesuch recordings of large-scale symphonic works based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland were best sellers 20 years ago, captivating the public with their intoxicating romanticism and sumptuous tonal beauty. Yet that music has inexplicably disappeared from the CD catalogs, with the exception of a difficult-to-find Japanese reissue of the Decca label recording of Final Alice (for soprano, folk group, and orchestra). Still, there is certainly a large audience waiting to discover, and rediscover, the glories of the 71-year-old Del Tredici's music, as evidenced by the fact that his choral/orchestral work Paul Revere's Ride earned a 2007 Grammy nomination for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.
