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Saturday, September 21, 2002

By Jane Vranish

It was the kind of concert that fit the vision of Carnegie Mellon University's Jill Watson Festival Across the Arts. The festival -- conceived in honor of former architecture student Jill Watson, who died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 -- encourages intersection with a high standard of experimentation across the arts.

Cuarteto Latinoamericano, resident quartet at the university since 1987, provided a program that had at its core a trio of regional composers: West Virginia native George Crumb, CMU music department head Alan Fletcher and fifth-year student Christian Kreigeskotte, the winner of the group's 2002 string quartet composition competition.

But the scope of the program, played with enormous power and passion, went far beyond local roots in variety and scope.

Crumb's work, in particular, had a global effect. Inspired by the Vietnam War, "Black Angels" (1970) employed his extraordinary landscape of musical effects. The stringed instruments were amplified, allowing the players to use thimbles on the tips of their fingers in trembling trills, tap to the strings with metal rods and to achieve a glassy Baroque sound (allowing the piece to transcend time) by placing the bow above the fingers on the strings.

In addition, the musicians had at their disposal a collection of percussive instruments, including maracas, a gong and assorted water goblets played with a bow. Whispers, shouts and vague words punctuated the score.

While it sounds like a string of exotic musical gems designed only to dazzle the ear, Crumb's complex structural approach immersed the listener in a well-defined and cohesive world, liberally enhanced by the emotionally charged interpretation of the Cuarteto Latinoamericano.

That type of emotional content was cultivated by Fletcher's "String Quartet," which preceded Crumb's piece. This work, a play of love and death, was richly delineated by harmonies that were thickly intertwined. Conceived in four movements and more traditional in concept, the piece nonetheless revealed a fertile imagination in the layering of the instruments, sometimes cascading, often escalating. The endings hung in the air like whispers of love until the final, definitive unison chord.

Kreigeskotte likewise turned inward, finding his inspiration in a Zen-like world that depicted a personal journey up a mountain in "Himalaya."

This composer had a number of techniques at his disposal. There were overlapping intervals and dripping chords like Fletcher and glassy sounds and accented trills similar to Crumb. But it lacked Crumb's cohesive point of view and Fletcher's surging emotional substance. And despite the suitable conflict between inner spirit and jarring reality, the piece didn't sweep toward a fitting conclusion.

Jane Vranish is a free-lance dance and music critic for the Post-Gazette.