JOAN TOWER (b.1938): Incandescent (String Quartet No. 3), Angels (String Quartet No. 4), White Water (String Quartet No. 5), Dumbarton Quintet for Piano and String Quartet.

Catalogue Number: 04R069
Label: Naxos
Reference: 8.559795
Format: CD
Price: $11.98
Description: Tower is known for tough, sinewy, emotionally confrontational works that remain very accessible, and these pieces do not disappoint. The 3rd Quartet was written in 2012. The piece contains fluidly dissonant passages with many glissandi, which suggest a kind of aquatic texture, and faster, tumultuously propulsive passages which seem not to. But the various levels of mobility, the title 'White Water' and the piece's intense, dark tone make complete sense when one discovers that the quartet is a response to Bill Viola's video installation 'Going Forth by Day' which explores ideas of transitions between birth, life, death and an afterlife in powerful, enigmatic, iconic images in which water plays an important rôle. In one, water cascades out of a building's façade, for which Tower's vigorously active music is a perfect aural simile; elsewhere, shadowy scenes in Viola's trademark slow motion - a ship departing for a distant shore, a figure ascending into the air from a still lake - are mirrored in Tower's slow, mysterious music. Incandescent, the composer's Third Quartet from 3003, is also aptly, and more obviously, described by its title. The music seems propelled by an inner volcanic energy, its potential evident just beneath the surface in the work's tense slower music, erupting to the surface in white-hot rivulets of rapid-flowing action - toccata-like note-streams in the form of solo cadenzas bursting free of the quartet textures - when it can no longer be contained. The 4th Quartet is related to Tower's powerful tone-poem Stroke (05Q013); the Angels of the title are those who cared for her brother after his medical catastrophe. The work's vigorously agitated propulsive music recalls the furious energy of the orchestral piece, while passages of warm, enveloping consonant harmony pay tribute to the stroke victim's caregivers. Perhaps because of its intensely personal 'programme' this piece's emotional temperature is high even for this highly expressive composer. The Quintet bears the strong imprint of Shostakovich, who by the composer's admission was a recent influence at the time of composition. (The same is somewhat true of the composer's output throughout the 2000s, less so more recently.) Nonetheless, there is no pastiche here; Tower still speaks with her own voice, and while the composers share a similar approach to unyielding ratcheting up of tension and dynamic momentum, the specific associations with Shostakovich have more to do with texture and phrase shaping than anything that sounds like his actual material. Like the other works here the Quintet is in a single span, but more clearly divided into movements. Blair McMillen (piano), Daedalus Quartet, Miami String Quartet (Incandescent and Angels).