- Peter Gannushkin/downtownmusic.net
- Mivos Quartet
Because I’ve presented a couple of concerts by them in Chicago over the last year (including one this past Sunday at Constellation), I haven’t really had the chance to proclaim my adoration for the remarkable New York string ensemble Mivos Quartet, a fearless, precise, and forward-looking new-music group dedicated to some of the toughest material being written today. But I’m pleased as hell to watch them play, strictly as a listener, tonight when they perform an intimate concert at Experimental Sound Studio, the local premiere of the third string quartet by composer Patrick Higgins. In 2013 the group released a superb CD featuring Higgins’s second string quartet and a radical reworking of the same piece, here titled Glacia. The quartet’s work employs a palindrome-like structure to explore memory—that is, phrases in the second half of the seven-movement piece obliquely and not so obliquely recall earlier passages, which draw upon a bruising mixture of materials and approaches—atonality, sweetly melodic lines, harsh dissonance, and more.
Today’s playlist:
