More thinking about absent friends and the circles they ran in, especially as this weekend brought news a missing friend’s body was found. RIP Lane Campbell. And this weekend was the anniversary of another friend’s death, Melissa Bontempo. Two of the biggest music fans I was ever lucky enough to know among many, many other fine qualities.
Carpe Diem String Quartet – Ancestors on 03/07/2021
Carpe Diem String Quartet have been one of the Columbus music scene’s gems for 15 years, straddling the line between the classic quartet repertoire and brand new work from living composers. Their stream this week was a brilliant example of how well they work both sides of that line.
The quartet kicked off their program with the founding father of the modern string quartet. Their jubilant thrill-ride take on Haydn’s “Opus 76, No. 1,” amplified and underlined the sense of invention and play and the different forms rubbing against and sparking with one another, sacrificing none of the piece’s intense emotional impact.
They closed with Erberk Eryılmaz’s dazzling fireworks display and deep dive into the folk music of Thrace, “Tracian Airs of Besime Sultan.” Bold spinning dances and sudden fires as the quartet zoomed in and out of the most microscopic details, shining a light on them like an Elizabeth Bishop villanelle then pulling back to show us the whole undulating landscape.
As great as those pieces were, I came for the world premiere in the middle and it more than lived up to my high expectations. Mark Lomax II has been at the highest tier of Columbus’s best composers for a long time. The world got to experience that brilliance with wider recognition of his epic 400: An Afrikan Suite in 2019.
When interviewing him about that masterpiece for a preview, it surprised me that Lomax had less luck breaking into the classical/chamber music worlds, with quartets and even a ballet that weren’t produced. With recent connections to the Wexner Center and the Johnstone Fund, that’s happily started to change in recent years. This world premiere of the entirety of “String Quartet No. 1” continues that much-needed corrective arc.
Partly inspired by his Grandfather and two other elders who were important to him, Lomax also made connections to the more than 500,000 people we lost this year in a soaring four-movement work of tribute and memory that never succumbs to despair. The opening movement uses long tones and swirling harmonies to evoke a home-going ceremony, rapturous cries bubble up and recede.
The second movement, “Reflection,” ripples with bouncing pizzicato and dialogue between the strings. Some of the most joyous writing and playing in the entire piece shows up here and the kind of uncanny tightness you only see in this sort of ensemble from players who know one another this intimately; this was the section of the piece that reminded me most of Lomax’s jazz writing, the catchy but always surprising rhythms and the sense of trust in the players.
“Acceptance,” the third movement, orbits around a haunting, evolving viola melody from Korine Fujiwara as the rest of the quartet creates a world for that line to inhabit. “Soul in Flight” ends the piece with high, sliding, and soaring lines swirling around a singing cello from Ariana Nelson.
It’s remarkable work from one of my favorite composers and, looking at death again both near and far as I said in the preface, it was exactly the balm I needed on a down Sunday evening. A brilliantly arranged and ordered program that makes me want to get out and see something as soon as I responsibly can.
This is still available on YouTube for an indeterminate amount of time: https://youtu.be/V7CZPUiN5fY
Screen of Distance 