Review: Miró Quartet Live!
By: Jack Sullivan

This recording of old and new string quartets will make you feel cheerful about American music, even though one of the pieces is by a European and the other uses Eastern gestures.  Both works evoke American landscapes, and both have an open sound that seems an indeliable part of American musical identity.

Kevin Puts’s 2007 Credo uses delicate harmonics, vibrato-free hymns, and exotic modes to beautiful effect.  I cringe when I read program notes about new pieces that promise “a tour of the places where I find solace and hope” and have movement titles like “The Violin Guru of Katonah”: please, not another New Age, World Music assemblage of cloying cliches.  This piece is pretty sugary, especially the finale, put Puts knows how to write a tune and how to produce wonderfully prismatic effects in the scherzo sections.  The opening movement combines both qualities in rapt solo lines and quietly racing traceries.  This haunting work sounds a bit like Hovhaness or Part but has its own serene personality.  It was written for the Miro Quartet, which plays it with breathtaking purity and poetry.

They use the same approach with Dvorak’s American Quartet.  I’ve never heard a performance so light, feathery, and full of open air.  Dvorak wanted this quartet to sound American, not European, and that is communicated here.  He wrote it in a three-day spurt of inspiration in Spillville, Iowa, and the Miro players make it sound spontaneous and joyful.  The opening movement sparkles and flows and is over before we know it; the slow movement, based on a Negro spiritual (a form that was not taken seriously until Dvorak’s New World Symphony) is full of aching lyricism and subtle phrasing.  He constructed II to sound like a Scarlet Tanager, and the Miro players do indeed sing it like a songbird.  The finale races to the finish line with pure joy, holding the last chord as if they don’t want the piece to end.

The Tokyo (Sony) and Cleveland (Telarc) quartets supply strong competition in this music, and I’ve always loved the spirited and warm-hearted Guarneri reading from 1972 (RCA).  None of these, however, have and attractive contemporary American piece on the same program.

This is the first installment of a new series called “The Miro Quartet Live”, taped before an audience at the University of Texas at Austin.  The engineers supply a warm acoustic with a sense of open space.