randy_byers | Reading

Last week's grocery order came, not with the prepackaged boneless chicken thighs I'd ordered, but with some wrapped up from the meat counter. This made me worried that they wouldn't last as long, so I hastened to use the pound-and-a-half of them in the next two evening's dinners. I fetched two favorite recipes from my little homebrewed cookbook.

First was lemon chicken, which is made by pan-frying whole boneless thighs that have been coated in flour, and then taking the chicken out of the pan and making the sauce in the leftover juices. The recipe says to prepare the chicken by pounding it thin, so it will cook all the way through, as there's a limit for how long you can cook it in the pan before the surface begins to burn. But I can't be bothered with the pounding (experience having shown I can't do it very well), so I found a shortcut: take the cooked chicken, before putting it back in the pan with the sauce, and zap it in the microwave for 30 seconds.

Then one of my two recipes for Chinese cashew chicken, both of which B. likes better than most of the cashew chicken dishes we've had as takeout from local Chinese restaurants. (Actually there's one she likes, but it's from Menlo Park, which is 20 miles away so opportunity to come home from there with dinner is limited.) This requires cutting the meat up in smaller chunks, which is something of a bear of a task but worth it for the results. This one has a sauce including lots of garlic and hoisin sauce as well as soy sauce and chicken broth, which starts out liquid and then sets in place. For cashews, I grab a handful from a can of halves and pieces, which work better in recipes than whole cashews.

For this one, the veggies can be included in the main dish. I'd brought a couple packages of jollof rice home from the newage grocery in Ashland, and made congee* out of it, which owing to the size of the package made for a huge result, especially as I'd mixed a pound of cooked ground turkey into it, a trick I'd borrowed from the recipe for Cajun rice dressing (aka "dirty rice"). Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that the leftovers are making a great side dish for dinners that need rice. Scoop some into a cereal bowl and zap it for a minute and a half.

*Congee is made by taking a rice recipe and doubling both the amount of water and the cooking time. The result is not that different from a regular rice dish, but it has half the carbs.

history_monk

Back in 2021-22, I spent 8 months in London, working from there and taking care of my mother. I'm not quite doing that yet, because she's still in hospital after a fall that broke three ribs and a collarbone. I'm living in her flat and visiting the hospital four days a week with an evening meal for her, since the hospital food is pretty poor. I also take her post in, pay her bills, and so on.

Oddly, this is more stressful than looking after her at home. I hope I'll be able to go down to three days a week soon, which will leave me more capacity for working.

She's started physiotherapy and is doing reasonably well with it, so there is a reasonable hope she'll come home this month. Mentally, she is fine, but she is 90 years old, so physical recovery isn't very fast.

Current Mood: stressed
Current Location: Mum's flat
Current Music: Radio 3

calimac

I didn't attend this concert, even though it was local. Not in person, anyway. My slowly recuperating health is still not up to such a venture. But this community orchestra, which I've heard before, had such a tempting pops-oriented program that I signed up for the livestream version and took it in that way, just as I'd done for Banff.

It was all dance music: a suite from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, parts of which I like and parts of which I could do without; and three works of Latin American origin: the two most standard Mexican pops-classical numbers, Moncayo's Huapango and Márquez's Danzón No. 2, and a suite of Three Latin American Dances by Gabriela Lena Frank. This was more a set of tone poems than the others' dance hall numbers.

Thomas Alexander conducted, and for an encore they played an encore: the last couple minutes of Huapango over again.

There were, as you'd expect of a community orchestra playing difficult music, some weak and rough spots here and there, but they entirely avoided playing the Mexican pieces with a flat Anglo accent, a horror I've actually heard once or twice.

What I could have really done without was the municipal puffery talks from orchestra members in between every two pieces. It wasn't so much that they were begging for contributions, though there was a bit of that, it was more that they wanted to assure the listeners what a great orchestra they are, and how educational they're being by inviting local high school students to play along with them, to give them exposure to real "high level" (that's the term they used) playing.

There's high level and there's high level - this orchestra manages coherent playing with artistic interpretation, but next to a professional orchestra, there's no comparison. And judging by the last time I heard a community orchestra with high school students attached, and then they left and I could hear the orchestra without them, the orchestra didn't build them up, they dragged it down.

This was just fun to hear the music.

calimac

Have you seen any of those bits on late-night comedy shows where they send a crew out on to the street and ask passersby some simple question (like, "can you point to and name any country on this boundary-outline map of the world?") and compile clips of people completely failing at it?

Here's such a video in which, gratifyingly, most of them get it right. Query is to fill in the missing word in various famous quotations from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Not from a comedy show, but filmed at and by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the lobby of the theater holding this year's production of same (which I saw), which might be considered a giveaway.

calimac

The noted fantasy and horror writer died on Sunday.

I'd read some of her works. Not so much the Saint-Germain chronicles, which were her best known and most voluminous work, but a few other things. I particularly got a kick out of a light fantasy called A Baroque Fable, which I have an autographed copy of here: the story contains songs, and there's something at least unusual, probably unique among fantasy novels at the end of the book: printed music of the tunes of those songs, composed by the author herself.

For music, especially opera, was an abiding interest in Quinn's life. Indeed, the idea for the Count Saint-Germain came from a real man of unknown origin using that name who floated around the court of Louis XV. He was a musician and composer, making him of interest to Quinn. Rumors of extended lifespans followed him around, and Quinn's idea was, what if he were an immortal vampire? and a series of novels depicting him as such and placing him in a variety of settings followed.

But for me, Quinn Yarbro was primarily a person whom I knew. She was part of the circle of sf people I joined when I went to UC Berkeley as a student in the '70s. I was part of "the gang from the late, lamented Magic Cellar" to whom A Baroque Fable is dedicated, and I often saw and chatted with her there while the Cellar lasted. It was there, too, that she brought the first printed copies of Hotel Transylvania, the first Saint-Germain book. I also was invited to a small, invitational social group that met at the home of Quinn and her then-husband Don Simpson, a tinkerer, inventor, and artist of vast imagination, who is still with us today. We talked sometimes of music, often lots of other things, and it was always interesting.

So I knew Quinn fairly well in a casual acquaintance way for some time, and we continued to greet each other as friends in later years. I last saw her at the San Jose Worldcon in 2018, where she was one of the Guests of Honor. I ran into her at an off-campus party at the nearby home of mutual friends, and we had one last friendly and agreeable conversation. I'll miss her fierce intelligence and inquisitive mind.

calimac

Box score:
1st. Poiesis Quartet
2nd. Arete Quartet
3rd. Quartet KAIRI

And so it's over. A couple hours after the end of last night's final concert of the Banff International String Quartet Competition with all the competitors, the three finalists were announced. (The one time I saw this happen in person, the director just got up before a microphone at the campus bistro, where a lot of us were hanging out for the evening.) That led to a concert this afternoon with each of the three finalists taking a long set, and then after a couple more hours of cogitation, the formal announcement of the three-place results, this one on the concert hall stage with a lot of applause and handing out of certificates.

In past years, the finalist round has consisted of a full performance of a major Beethoven or Schubert quartet, but this year they moved the ad lib round into that place. Each finalist had 45 minutes to play whatever they wanted for string quartet, subject only to the provisios that 1) they had to include at least three different composers, 2) at least full movements, no excerpts, 3) nothing they'd previously played during the festival, 4) though they could choose works by any connecting principle or none, they had to write an essay explaining why they'd made that selection. These essays were distributed to the in-person audience as program inserts, but if they made it onto the website, I couldn't find it.

So here are the finalists, what I thought of their earlier performances, what they played in the finalist round and how it came out.

First place, winner of the 2025 competition, is the Poiesis Quartet, and I have to say I'm very pleased. I thought they were by far the best of the three finalists. Particularly fine were their outstanding Brahms and extremely good Bartók. I also liked their playful Haydn and their dramatic Beethoven. The only thing I found disappointing was their 21st century selection, which they may have played well but which was not interesting music. They were at least the most interesting looking of all the competitors. They eschewed standard concert wear entirely, and their dress and grooming were ... well, this photo gives a good idea. They also use more gender-neutral pronouns than all the other competitors put together. They're Americans who are all graduates of the Oberlin Conservatory, and it's been suggested they may have picked up some of their style there, or maybe that's the appeal that's the reason they went there.

Poiesis's finalist recital was also all living 21st century composers, but it came out very differently from the earlier round. All four of these works were very interesting, even at times captivating, if not ingratiating. Two of them were basically quiet. Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a composer of the Chickasaw Nation, whose work I've heard done by the Oakland Symphony. His Pisachi has some fast and dramatic sections, but is mostly slow held notes with a strong folk flavor perhaps inherited from the composer's people. An even more hushed piece titled Phosphorescent Sea was well described by its title. Its composer was Joe Hisaishi, much older than the other composers on Poiesis's list and best known as the house composer for Hayao Miyazaki's films. Brian Raphael Nabors, an African-American composer who's also going to be done by Oakland, offered the first faster piece, a quartet that's brisk and snappy, bristling with colorful effects. The Seventh Quartet by Kevin Lau, Canadian of Chinese birth, was also fast and lively if less colorful than Nabors. These were all strongly and intelligently played and well sold by the Poiesis Quartet.

Second place goes to the Arete Quartet, two women and two men from Korea. They did a fine Schumann, and I also liked their clean and elegant Haydn. They did a lively job on their 21st century selection, but I disliked the piece. But I found their Schubert wanting in coherence and their Berg bloodless and enervating; they got very bad ratings from me for those.

For the finalist round, Arete picked a more conventional 20C program, Britten's Three Divertimenti and the same Janáček First Quartet that Kairi and Cong already did. Arete went even further than Cong on this one, building up the dissonant squawks and sounding as if the consonant passages existed only to increase the contrast. And to provide a third composer, Arete played the Mozart movement whose weird introduction gives the K. 465 quartet the nickname "Dissonant."

Third place goes to Quartet KAIRI, which I'm not going to use the capital letters on all the time. This group consists of four men. They're Japanese or Chinese by origin, but they're all studying in Salzburg now, so they consider that their home base. Their best performance was their thick and resonant Haydn; they won a special prize for the best Haydn performance of the round. Their Mendelssohn and Schubert seemed to me adequate but not the outstanding work you expect here, and their Janáček First was the opposite of Arete, attempting to dampen down the dissonance in defiance of the composer's intent. Their 21C piece was a piece of retro modernism of the sort I find undesirable.

Kairi's finalist round, like Arete's, consisted of two standard 20th century works leavened with a little Mozart. One of the pieces was Landscape by Toru Takemitsu, whose shows its old modernist character by making its sound sheets full of stringent dissonance. Tate and Hisaishi don't do that. More to my taste was Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, but I had a harder time parsing their slow and gentle approach to the outer movements. The Mozart was two movements from K. 575, one of the Prussian Quartets.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise posting in

dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

calimac

The last round of the Banff International String Quartet Competition before the nine competitors are trimmed to three finalists was today. And it took pretty much all of today to play it.

Each contestant had to play 1) the first movement only of one of the big & great Beethoven or Schubert quartets: in practice, it was one of Beethoven's three Op. 59 quartets commissioned by Count Razumovsky, or one of Schubert's three last quartets; 2) a modern 20th century quartet selected from a curated list.

Magenta gave the First Razumovsky a strong and dedicated reading, while Viatores rendered it more crabbed and contrapuntal. Hana did the only Second Razumovsky, making it brisk and compact. Poiesis made the Third Razumovsky, like Magenta's First, big and dramatic, while Elmire's was more relaxed and expansive. For the Schuberts, Cong played the Rosamunde slowly and as gently as the music would permit. (Disaster struck when the violist broke a string just before the second theme. They stopped, left the stage, came back five minutes later and started over, even more slowly than before.) Kairi in Death and the Maiden were good but a little dry. Arete's G Major was frustrating: quiet parts were so slow and soulful as to lose the thread, while the dramatic parts were so frantic as to lose the thread in the other direction. Nerida also played the G Major, and they got the balance right, as well as equipping the piece with effective fluttering sounds for tremolos.

For the modern round, 3 of the 9 competitors chose a Bartók quartet. (My first time, it was 8 of 10.) Of these, the best was Poiesis's Fifth. It was wild and woolly and quite daring, fit to occupy a minor place among the great Banff Bartók performances of the past. Or at least what I heard of it was: a large part was ripped out of my livestream by an internet connection failure, and the recording isn't yet up on the website as I write. Elmire in the Second was interesting, finding an amazing amount of melodic grace in it but not neglecting that it's not all like that. And Hana's Third was just a typical Bartók performance, impressive but not exciting or ingratiating.

Two quartets picked another Banff modern favorite, Janáček's First. Kairi was determined to make it as lyrical as possible, even dampening out the dissonant squawks that litter parts of the piece. As with Nerida in Schubert, somebody else got the balance right: this time it was Cong, who were even lusher in places, but that only made for the better contrast between the elements.

The other four picked singletons. Of these, by far the best - to my considerable surprise, both because this group has been iffy and normally I detest this piece - was the Magenta in Ligeti's First. They found coherence in this random collection of ticks, and they made it fun to listen to. Nerida in Britten's First was impressive in this odd experimental composition, ranging from spooky to exciting. Hindemith's Fifth is the only one I'd never heard before, a cross between his early modernist and mid-period academic music which the Viatores seemed to handle pretty well. The disappointment was the Arete in Berg's Lyric Suite. I know this piece can be attractive, but their version was just cold and alienating atonality with no redeeming features.

The three finalists will probably be announced about an hour from now. Toting up my evaluations, I'd vote for Nerida and Poiesis, with probably Elmire or perhaps Magenta for a third. Based on past experience, maybe one of those will actually make it. The judges' criteria are different from mine.

ETA: The finalists are Arete, Kairi, and Poiesis. I'll have more to say about those choices in Sunday's post.

calimac

The most exotic part of the Banff International String Quartet Composition comes in the Canadian Commission round. The idea of this round is to face the performers with a work for which they have no previous knowledge or preconceptions whatever. The organizers of this Canadian festival commission a Canadian composer - a different one each time - to write a 9-minute work for string quartet which all the competing groups play in a single marathon concert.

Sitting through one of these events - and this is the fourth time I've done it, twice in person and twice livestreamed - is quite an experience. Despite the brevity of the composition, it takes close to 3 hours to do it. And there isn't much music, however agreeable, that you really want to hear nine or ten times in a row. This time, at least, I did enjoy the piece, and despite weariness I did like it better the more I heard it. The fun comes in evaluating the nine or ten different approaches to the music.

The music was Rapprochement (String Quartet No. 3) by Kati Agócs (pronounced a-goach, rhymes with coach). It's a largely consonant piece, more focused on ensemble work than solos, filled with melodic phrases, lots of rising glissandi, and outbreaks of snappy rhythm. The composer says, "The score leaves lots of room for the players to shape nuances of dynamics, articulation, balances and color, and it calls upon the four individuals to play transcendently as one."

What I found was that the big division was between the groups that did "play transcendently as one," with a rich unified sound, and those who played in a more separated, transparent style. I found the former gave off the air in some passages of Glassian minimalism, while Lisa of the Iron Tongue, with whom I've been having postmortem conversations about the concerts, heard in the second group occasional echoes of Debussy and Stravinsky, which fits with my impression of the air if not the compositional style of high modernism, quite different from the more unified performers.

What mystified Lisa was that the performances ranged in length from 8 to 9 1/2 minutes, an unusually large range for such a short work. We didn't have the score to study; were there sections marked as optional? There were things I heard in some performances but not in others; did I just miss them, due perhaps to differences in style, or were they cut out?

Combining my evaluations with those of Lisa and Bruce H., the other participant in our conversations, I'd say the most unified performance, evidently what the composer intended, was from the Nerida, with a similar approach from Viatores and Elmire. The Arete, Cong, and Hana were more detached or transparent. Magenta was perhaps somewhere in between. The liveliest and wittiest performance came from Kairi, and the most intensely emotional from Poiesis.

calimac

In three concerts, two yesterday and one this morning, the nine contestants in the Banff International String Quartet Competition got through their second round, each playing one work of their choice from the 19th-century Romantic-era repertoire.

The most interesting contrasts came from paired works by the same composer. Claude Debussy wrote only one quartet, and his was the only single work played twice. If you like Debussy, you would have preferred the Viatores Quartet version, full of the lush, exotic Debussy sound. If, however, you prefer something drier, you might have liked the Cong Quartet, which played it strong and heavy part of the way but reverted to standard Debussy in the second half. I'm not a Debussy fan and wasn't really thrilled by either.

I do like Robert Schumann, however, and here we had a vehement contrast. Quatuor Magenta played his First Quartet with surprising vehemence, tough and even brutal. The one thing it didn't do was sound anything like Schumann. I found it very impressive in its own way, but less sure it was a way worth pursuing. The Arete Quartet, on the other hand, played a Third Quartet that sounded just like Schumann. It was slow and romantic in approach, and it had soul. The fast loud passages achieved intensity without vehemence, just to prove after Magenta that it could be done.

There were four quartets by Felix Mendelssohn. The big contrast here was between two quartets from his Op. 44 set. No. 3 from the Nerida Quartet was an ideal performance. Their Haydn had been lively and bustling, and their Mendelssohn was also lively and bustling in the same spirit. That works for Mendelssohn, and this was an outstanding job. Quatuor Elmire in No. 2 also did a good job, but their style seemed fussy and mechanical coming immediately after the Nerida. It wasn't bad, it just faded in comparison.

As for the other Mendelssohns, both Quartet Kairi in Op. 13 and Quartett Hana in Op. 80 were very good, Hana tighter in execution, Kairi a little sloppy except in the slow movement, which was their best part. My problem is that both these works have been spoiled for me by hearing truly great performances of each in the past that have stuck in my head, and however good you may be, if you can't match those it's going to sound like weak tea to me. Kairi was further cursed by a mishap not of their own making. Op. 13 begins with an introduction of slow, soft chords which repeat at the end. And both occurrences were marred by cell phones going off. And this after the competition director had, introducing the concert, warned yet again to turn those buggers off.

If the Nerida got second place in my ratings for the best performances of the round, first place definitely went to the one remaining entrant: the Poeisis Quartet in Johannes Brahms's Op. 67. I am a great partisan of Brahms chamber music, except for his string quartets which I find most performances of to be bland and rather boring. Not this one. It was lively and exciting, and most importantly it sounded like it was written by the same composer whose next opus would be his dramatic and intensely characterful First Symphony. This had that same character. It was, hands down, the best Brahms quartet performance I have ever heard.

Poeisis and Nerida both did among the best of the Haydn round. They're the best here. I'll be especially looking out for their work in the next two rounds.

calimac

On behalf of myself and my co-editors, Michael D.C. Drout and Yvette Kisor, here are the expected contents of volume 21 of the journal Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. This issue will be dated 2024; we know we're behind. All of the works are now in the hands of our publisher, West Virginia University Press, and the volume is scheduled to be published in softcover and on Project MUSE in a few months. - David Bratman, co-editor

Tolkien Studies 21 (2024)

**

Alexandra Bolintineanu, "Tolkien's Elegiac Trees: Enta Geweorc and the Ents Across Time"
Patrick J. Murphy, "The Riddles of The Hobbit, the Academic History of the Exeter Book, and the Invention of Tolkien's Ring"
Anika Jensen, "'I Wonder If Any Song Will Ever Mention It': Locating Precarious Time in The Lord of the Rings"
Eduardo Boheme Kumamoto, "The Allegiant Translator: J.R.R. Tolkien, Burton Raffel, and Verse Translation"
John Garth and Peter Gilliver, "The Wanderer's Return: New Findings on Tolkien in Oxford 1918-19"
Claudio A. Testi, "From 'The Tree' to 'Leaf by Niggle': Up to the Mountains and Beyond"
Peizhen Wu and Michael D.C. Drout, "'The Course of Actual Composition': Analysis of some aspects of the revision history of The Lord of the Rings using 'Lexomic' digital methods"

**
Notes and Documents

Łukasz Neubauer, "The 'Origin of Gandalf': Josef Madlener's Der Berggeist and the Transboundary Mountain Spirit Rübezahl as Purported Sources of Inspiration for Tolkien's Wizard"
Matthew Thompson-Handell, "Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings"

**
Book Reviews

Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth, by Robert Stuart, reviewed by Yvette Kisor
Representing Midle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology, by Robert T. Tally, Jr., reviewed by Douglas C. Kane
Pity, Power, and Tolkien's Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many, by Thomas P. Hillman, reviewed by Clare Moore
Theology and Tolkien: Practical Theology, ed. Douglas Estes, reviewed by Nick Polk
How to Misunderstand Tolkien: The Critics and the Fantasy Master, by Bruno Bacelli, reviewed by Lori Campbell-Tanner

Cami D. Agan, David Bratman, The Rev. Tom Emanuel, Jonathan Evans, Jason Fisher, and John Magoun, "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2021"
David Bratman, "Bibliography (in English) for 2022"
Errata: TS 18

calimac

Today at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, which I'm watching livestream, the other five competitors who didn't play yesterday got their turns to play one Haydn quartet and one work from the 21st century.

The Haydns spanned the range of aesthetic approach. The Cong Quartet (so named because they're from Hong Kong - I guess if they spelled it "Kong" people would think they were from Skull Island) played Op. 33/2, known as the "Joke" Quartet for its infamous fake-out ending, and they played it jokily. They got into the rhythmic swing of the work, all the way through and not just in the finale, and found the lively Haydn spirit there. The Poeisis Quartet in Op. 71/2 also caught the playfulness and spark of the music, though their approach was not especially witty, unlike the Cong or yesterday's Nerida.

The other three were more serious. Quartet KAIRI brought crispness and clarity to Op. 74/1. Their playing was rich, smooth, and resonant, even buttery. The Arete Quartet played the relatively early Op. 20/2 as if it were less a Sturm & Drang work than a Baroque one, clean and elegant, the more so as it has a fugue for a finale, here hushed and intricate. But by far the most serious-minded, sober and plain performance was Quatuor Magenta (pronounced MAH-zhen-tah - they're French) in Op. 76/3. This is the "Emperor" Quartet, the one whose slow movement is variations on a Haydn theme written as a hymn to the Holy Roman Emperor, and which eventually became "Deutschland über alles," as a result of which hardly anyone plays the quartet any more. So due credit to a French ensemble - of four women, yet - for taking it up.

Of the 21st century works, none really appealed to me, though at least they all sounded different, unlike the last festival where they all seemed much of a muchness. The most enjoyable was the Cong's performance of Quartet No. 7 by Lawrence Dillon. A clever and strongly rhythmic work, with lots of whining calls for individual instruments above the chattering of the group. Something similar was the case with Magenta in Pascal Dusapin's Quartet No. 5 - yes, that's the third time this piece has come up in two days. Magenta's rendition seemed more haunting and abstract than the Elmire's yesterday.

Kairi did Floral Fairy by Toshio Hosokawa, which put a wispy sound with lots of harmonics at the service of an abrupt, random, detached style that was far too reminiscent of Webern. This is the sort of modernism that I'd hoped was dead by now. And I can't say much more for Many Many Cadences by Sky Macklay, from Poeisis. With some variances later on, this consists of an endless repetition of a jerky descending motif ending in the tonic, so yeah it's a cadence though it doesn't approach it through a conventional harmonic sequence. And even less for the Arete's choice of Jörg Widmann's Hunting Quartet, which we also heard yesterday, the only difference being that, for this work requiring waving bows around a lot, the Arete's violins and viola, unlike yesterday's Viatores, stood up to play this piece.

Next up is a round from the romantic-era repertoire, with the nine quartets playing seven different pieces. This will also be spread over two days, but I probably won't write it up until it finishes on Thursday.

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Dry Ice Factory

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Reading

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Back in London, caring for Mum

concert review: Cambrian Symphony

they know the answer

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

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