Zimbalista, ConTempo String Quartet

Galway Arts Festival

The world of 2010 is very different to the world of 1970, when George Crumb wrote his string quartet, Black Angels – or is it? Forty years ago there were major national disasters in Peru (an earthquake) and East Pakistan (a cyclone and tidal waves) which claimed over 200,000 lives.

Nuclear power was a live topic in Asia, as India’s first nuclear power station came into operation. A new Boeing jetliner, nicknamed the jumbo jet, started commercial service. Underwater oil, in the North Sea, was in the news.

The first complete synthesis of a gene was announced. Computer storage was miniaturising, through IBM’s development of the floppy disc. And the US, already at war in Asia, in Vietnam, sent troops into Cambodia.

Crumb conceived his Black Angels, subtitled 13 images from the dark land, as "a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world", the trouble that was foremost in his mind being the Vietnam War.

The composer’s reputation in 1970 was high and was based on the novel sonorities he was exploring, by calling on performers to adopt unusual performing techniques.

Black Angelsis for electric (ie, amplified) quartet, and the musicians exploit, in Crumb's own words, "an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas and crystal glasses".

The music uses quotations (from Schubert and the Dies Irae), parodies early music (with an extraordinary evocation of a viol consort), imitates the sound of things which don't exist (in threnodies called Night of the Electric Insects), extends the string instruments to Hawaiian guitar effects, and even has the musicians perform with thimbles.

The piece, which could be thought of as an expression of war-inspired musical dysphoria, is a work that’s always arresting. It’s as sharp in theatrical gesture as it is in its novelties of sonority, but its anguish and protest are short- breathed rather than penetrating.

The chill of the Schubert that Crumb quotes ( Death and the Maiden) actually cuts far deeper than the ingenious series of shocks and surprises of Black Angelsitself.

Saturday’s performance by the Galway-based ConTempo Quartet was a full-on affair, unflinching and at times searing. But the audience’s response was strangely muted when compared to the rousing reception that was accorded to the ConTempo’s guest for the evening, Israeli percussionist Chen Zimbalista.

Zimbalista shone in two solos, his own, partly improvised Impulses Iand Menachem Wiesenberg's To Mimi.

Even in Zimbalista's hands, the Marimba Concerto by Brazilian composer and percussionist Ney Rosauro still sounded like thin padding. Astor Piazzolla's Fracanapawas the more stimulating of the evening's percussion/quartet collaborations.