Richard Linnett reports back from a performance by the Del Sol Quartet and Nick Davies at Chatter on 18 April, where fugal forms and Klezmer collided in a work by Derek David
Read more Featured Stories like this in The Strad Playing Hub
What do you get when you fuse Bach, Buddy DeFranco and the Klezmatics? You get Oh World, Goodnight; an epic four-movement quintet by composer Derek David, which was performed by the Del Sol Quartet and clarinetist Nick Davies at Chatter in Santa Fe and Albuquerque on 18 and 19 April respectively.
A remarkable composition, the piece seamlessly blended baroque string chamber stylings with the soaring attack of multiple alternating clarinets in the capable hands of Davies, blowing hard in klezmer and bebop modes.
Davies played four clarinets, B flat, A, E flat and bass, a different instrument in each movement. He traded licks with the strings on Bach-inspired passages and some rowdy hoedown fiddling, with the first three movements building to wild crescendoes that would abruptly crash into sonic chaos.
In the opening concertino there was a brilliant moment in which the string players suddenly broke into a fugue that sounded as if they were randomly tuning their instruments, before rousing into a sweet melody led by the clarinet.
The 45-minute quintet blended a pastiche of styles, including minuet, double fugue and concerto along with klezmer and Jewish cantorial styles. This listener also detected flights of the sort of double-high C screamers perfected by bebop clarinetists like Buddy DeFranco.
The final movement of the piece, ’Canonic Variations on a Theme From Bach,’ somberly reinvented the Bach chorale ’Es ist nun au smit meinem Leben’ with Davies playing sonorous leads on the bass clarinet.
Davies is a clarinetist with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and the artistic director and founder of the Rossini Club, a chamber music organisation based in Nantucket, Massachusetts, which co-commissioned Oh World, Goodnight with the Del Sol Performing Arts Organization.
According to Derek David’s programme notes his composition ’expresses a deeply personal internal world amongst the fears and anxiety of an ever destabilising world.
Del Sol cellist Kathryn Bates described what it was like to play the piece: ’It’s vulnerable, it’s beautiful, it’s gut-wrenching, it’s terrifying. So much of it feels like a reflection of life.’
The Del Sol performances in New Mexico were part of a tour promoting a forthcoming album featuring Oh World, Goodnight and Derek’s String Quartet no.4 ‘Kaddish’ that the quartet is recording this month in Boston and San Francisco.
No comments yet