Acclaimed JACK Quartet Visits UC San Diego
In May of this year, UC San Diego’s ArtPower and the San Diego chamber ensemble Art of Elan collaborated to bring the acclaimed JACK Quartet to San Diego for an exceptional concert of contemporary music. On Tuesday, in a welcome return engagement, these two organizations presented the JACK Quartet in concert in the UCSD Music Department’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall.
JACK Quartet in the May, 2024, San Diego Concert (l. to r.) Austin Wulliman, Christopher Otto, John Pickford Richards & Jay Campbell [photo (c.) Gary Payne]
The program of the JACK Quartet–violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell–featured a 2024 work by Korean-American composer Juri Seo, Three Imaginary Chansons, and two works by UCSD composer Rand Steiger, his 2018 Tropes and the world première of his Rage/Response.
Tropes calls for a most unusual physical placement of the quartet members: each player is seated in a far corner of the room, so their pianissimo lines sounded mysteriously ethereal, but their ensemble fortes provided a thrilling surround sound experience. The quavering tremolandos and long sustained lines of Tropes are the composer’s representations of the subtle differences among the various Jewish traditions as they intone the same lines of Sacred Scripture. Steiger has chosen the first four sentences from the book of Genesis, called the B’reisheet, and each quartet member presents a discrete school among the Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.
I happened to be seated a mere six feet in front of cellist Jay Campbell, so I was able to appreciate the subtleties of his attacks, deftly shaped motifs, and delicate pianissimo glissandos. With its pellucid performance of Tropes, the JACK Quartet created a compelling spiritual soundscape, an anomaly in the uncompromisingly secular culture of UCSD.
Rage/Resolve placed the quartet members in the traditional string quartet position on stage, and each player was connected to the digital sound source that picked up their lines and recapitulated them into the sonic mix through speakers suspended throughout the hall. In the composer’s program notes, he states that the first half of the piece reflects “feelings of anger and frustration that arise from relentlessly bleak and seemingly unsolvable geopolitical conflicts.” With blocks of aggressive, densely scored motifs layered with brusque tremolandos, Steiger created a glorious cacophony that successfully communicated his rage. But his resolution of languid, calming themes generously executed by violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Jay Campbell did not match the scope of his rage.
The tightly scored counterpoint of Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chanson and her neo-medieval harmonic palette gave a unique, winning character to these songs without words, a favorite 19th-century genre. Listeners who perceived the serpents, swans, dogs, and cocks mentioned in the clever song titles are possessed of more creative imaginations than I have. But Seo’s unusual harmonic vocabulary and sophisticated structures as well as the JACK Quartet’s sensuous sonority kept my attention from start to finish.
This concert was jointly presented by ArtPower and Art of Elan on December 10, 2024, in UC San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall.
Ken Herman, a classically trained pianist and organist, has covered music for the San Diego Union, the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego Edition, and for sandiego.com. He has won numerous awards, including first place for Live Performance and Opera Reviews in the 2017, the 2018, and the 2019 Excellence in Journalism Awards competition held by the San Diego Press Club. A Chicago native, he came to San Diego to pursue a graduate degree and stayed.Read more…