Music Review: Lei Liang – ‘String Quartets: Live’

The string quartet music of Chinese-American composer Lei Liang integrates folk traditions into a forward-looking and often lyrical contemporary sensibility. String Quartets: Live from New Focus Recordings sums up his inspired work for this format with live recordings by four different ensembles made over the past 20 years.

First up is a transcription for string quartet of the “Lamento della Ninfa” by Claudio Monteverdi. In this fascinating song from the early 1600s, Monteverdi specifies that the soprano, as the Nymph, is to sing “al tempo dell’affetto del animo” – according to the emotions – while the three male singers hold “al tempo della mano” (to the timing of the hand), e.g. to a regular beat. (Here’s a performance of the original by members of the Gesualdo Six and soprano Helen Charlston.) Liang’s faithful transcription for strings includes simulation of the plucking of a lute accompanying the “voices.” The Brentano Quartet’s performance expresses the emotional nuance Monteverdi calls for.

Next up is “Gobi Gloria,” which derives from Liang’s experience of Mongolian music. Listeners may be familiar with the eerie sound of throat singing, as its techniques have seeped into contemporary Western vocal music over the past few decades. We hear in the first section harmonics like you hear in Tuvan throat singing, along with frequent portamentos. In the middle section, music in the lower register suggests the deep drones of the Tuvan tradition, though with more rhythmic content. In the third section, harmonics, drones, melody, and rhythm converge. Within its restrictive folk modality, the music leaps and soars, huddles and cogitates, in the JACK Quartet’s evocative performance.

Old Taiwan

For “Song Recollections” Liang turned to folk music from aboriginal Taiwanese tribes. This is not a folk tradition with which I was familiar, but it seems to bear modal and other similarities to other East Asian music. In parts of this composition Liang asks the musicians to simulate not only the techniques but the colors of traditional instruments, and the Formosa Quartet, which champions Indigenous cultures and Taiwanese music, achieves this. (I’m old enough to remember when Western maps called Taiwan Formosa, a name derived from the Portuguese.)

In the 22-minute string quartet’s first song, harmonic swells are visited hesitantly by flickers of motion; only after several minutes does a plucked melody arrive. The pizzicatos take over but before you know it the song is over. The second song is fully devoted to the plucked sounds of folk instruments. The melody is sometimes hard to distinguish from the prickly accompaniment.

With its pentatonic mode, the third song resembles Chinese music that’s more familiar to Western ears, though interestingly the instruments here revel in the qualities of sound most native to the violin, viola, and cello. Tension gives way to pure excitement as the tempo drives upward.

A contemplative feeling presides over the atmospheric fourth song, where harmonic swells return, lazily shift from consonance to dissonance, and linger to create broad swaths of space without resolution. Weary wobbles and the merest hints of accented melody introduce the final song, which builds into a rhythmic rave-up of songful multiplicity for an energized conclusion.

Fragments and Madrigals

In “Serashi Fragments,” performed by the Mivos Quartet, Liang pays tribute to Serashi (1887-1968), a master of the Mongolian chor, an ancient two-string fiddle native to what is now the North China Inner Mongolia autonomous region. The piece is an abstract reflection on its sources, not a direct evocation, which is just as well, as few listeners will be familiar with chor music, which even for the curious is hard to find online.

The word “Fragments” in the title perhaps suggests a deconstruction, but if so, the music doesn’t provide clues as to what might be being deconstructed, and that’s OK. That this is deeply personal music is clear. Its fragments roll forward linearly, stringing together harmonic incidents, squeals and whines, and aggressive plucking, some of it so quiet it feels like a trip into the distant recesses of the mind.

Liang stays in Mongolia with “Madrigal Mongolia,” a reflection on the heartsickness and homesickness fundamental to Mongolian folk music. Portentously swaying chord changes have a Copland-esque grandeur in the sentimental early going. Jackknifing accentuation punctuates jittery sawing in another section. Eight minutes in, breathy tone clusters float above hesitant suggestions of rhythm and tune. Dramatic gestures carry powerful feeling in the next section.

The famous horsemen of Mongolia were often far from home, and the region’s folk music reflects that. Celestial harmonies waft in and out of focus. In the final minutes, the chords from the beginning return: Storytelling time is over as another day on the road dawns.

Collected over the past 20 years, the string quartet music on this album reflects the composer’s enduring engagement with folk traditions from his homeland and elsewhere. We often think of the Mongols as bloodthirsty warriors. In fact the Mongolian Empire, more than the great empires that preceded it, looked with great intellectual curiosity into the civilizations it spanned. Liang’s music fits right in with that openness.

String Quartets: Live from composer Lei Liang is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.