String Quartet No. 6 ...
CYPRESS QUARTET GIVES KEEN EDGE TO WRENCHING PREMIERE
By Richard Scheinin
San Jose Mercury News December 5, 2005
The symphonic music of Benjamin Lees has been championed by George Szell, Eugene Ormandy and Lorin Maazel. The legendary Budapest String Quartet performed his first string quartet; the Tokyo String Quartet commissioned his third. Last year, at 80, he was nominated for a Grammy.
The Cypress String Quartet plans to record all of his string quartets. It commissioned and premiered the fifth -- an edgy, tightly conceived roller-coaster of a piece -- in San Francisco in 2002. And Sunday night at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose, with Lees in attendance, it gave the world premiere of the sixth.
It is another fascinating, gutsy work, a 20-minute stomach tightener. Moods keep shifting, colors deepening, then evaporating. All is in flux: a tender theme turns violent, a humorous one grows sinister.
Listening to it, one has the feeling that Lees, from his perspective of 81 years, knows that you can't count on much. Life defies expectations, as does his piece, which has an acid charm about it. And Cypress understands its language, its thickening and dissolving textures, motor-driven rhythms and hints of hoedown music transformed. The quartet's performance was carefully etched and expressively delivered.
The new quartet's fourth movement opened with a luxurious line for cello. It had an almost sexy languor to it and was passed to the first violin, like a glass of wine handed by one partner in bed to the other.But seconds later, there were harsh bow strikes and then a burlesque: stops and starts, scoops and swoops traded about. A dance? A street fight? Certainly a jolt.``Doing the unexpected in a nice slow section where everyone is relaxed -- that's what the surrealists want,'' Lees said last year. In the late '50s and early '60s, Lees, who now lives in Palm Springs, lived in Paris where he became close to Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The dark beauty and unexpected turns of their surrealist art seeped into his own and have remained there.
There also is a certain precision. It all comes together for Lees, who is a refiner, rather than an inventor, of musical language. And a debunker of expectations.
MODERN QUARTET MUSIC: LEES ENTERS ANOTHER WORLD
By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
Week of Dec. 6-13, 2005
Vol. 8, No. 47
SAN JOSE---Benjamin Lees' latest string quartet---No. 6---is a dark, unsettling, disputative piece I keep wanting to call his "Ghost" Quartet. This restless construction invites us into a mysterious, forbidding world of Lees' own, quite different from his earlier chamber music. There are snatches of themes distilled out from the sound mass, and many quirky interruptions by individual instruments, sometimes with brief figures tossed back and forth as in a ballgame.
If it is not the world of the supernatural, it is at least an alien world, a dream world, with all sorts of intangibles that recede obstinately when you try to grasp them.
Some at the premiere Dec. 4 claimed discerning influences of Bartok, but the finale has some hallmarks of Shostakovich with its biting rhythmics , stops, and gaunt demeanor. The cello (Jennifer Kloetzel) plays an immense role in all this, particularly in voicing the soulful Lied of the arresting second movement, which I felt was the microcosm of the work.
PLEASE NOTE:
No reproductions of photos, articles, music or reviews are permitted without permission
of the Estate of Benjamin Lees.
No reproductions of photos, articles, music or reviews are permitted without permission
of the Estate of Benjamin Lees.