The highlight of the latest concert in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's new-music series, Engine 408, was Philip Glass' Quartet No. 2 for Two Violins, Viola and Cello, "Company," heard Thursday night in the intimacy of the SPCO Music Room.
The 1983 piece is pure minimalism, but for all its formal structure based on repetition and a clear sense of pulse, it was a passionate work, richly melodic and interspersed with moments of real drama.
Guest violinist Scott Yoo, along with SPCO violinist Steven Copes, violist Sabina Thatcher and cellist Sarah Lewis, captured the heartfelt nature of this engaging composition.
In contrast was Steve Reich's "Different Trains" for String Quartet and Pre-Recorded Sound. The 1988 work juxtaposed recorded reminiscences from Reich's childhood cross-country train trips in 1939 with recollections of survivors of the trains that transported fellow Jews to death camps during the same time.
The speech fragments inspired the musical material, with a recorded quartet, along with train sounds and sirens, heard behind an amplified live quartet. It was a fascinating experiment that despite being a tale of the Holocaust proved more intellectually engaging than emotionally affecting.
Filling out the program was John Adams' 1995 "Road Movies" for violin and piano, excellently played by Yoo and pianist Susan Grace. This work is more free-form, opening with an impressionistic sense of scenery flying by.
The piano brought an added harmonic richness to the slow moment, and the violin almost took on the feel of a Romantic sonata. The finale had the wit of jazz-inspired minimalism.
William Randall Beard is a Minneapolis writer.
