Jack Quartet @ Festival Messiaen au Pays de la Meige

Guillaume de Machault: Transcriptions of motets
Rose, Liz, Printemps, Verdure
Dame de qui toute ma joie vient
Inviolata genitrix

Iannis Xenakis: Tetora for string quartet

Allain Gaussin: Chakra for string quartet

Rodericus: Angelorum psalat (transcription)

Iannis Xenakis: Tetras, for string quartet

Jack Quartet
Christopher Otto, violin
Ari Streisfeld, violin
John Pickford Richards, viola
Kevin McFarland, cello

In the church of Le Chazelet, the Festival received the Jack Quartet, four up-and-coming boys, all Americans, who had benefited from the teachings of the Kronos Quartet and the Arditti Quartet: in short, a formation in which the virtuosity of the gesture , the energy of the sound and the cohesion of the group are brought to perfection. This stunning concert, honoring the memory of Xenakis, ideally combined the music of the Middle Ages, that of Machaut (14th century) and Rodericus (early 15th century) – through transcriptions made by the two violinists, Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld – and music today. The two ballads and the very famous motet Inviolata genitrix/Felix Virgo by Machaut which opened the concert, were reproduced in the delicacy and freshness of the rhythmic invention of these "pearls" of Ars Nova. Respecting the tuning in Pythagorean fifths practiced at the time, the musicians join the sounds of the fiddle by playing near the bridge to find the grain of its ideal. No doubt we had this evening an anthology version of Tetora by Xenakis, his third and last quartet written in 1990. It is close to the art of Machaut, by the strangeness of its polyphony and the freedom of its sound complexes . A haunting modal line also runs through most of the work, flowing at first then crystallizing into blocks of more powerful chords. The Jack Quartet approaches the work with a spatio-temporal vision which admirably guides its interpretation by giving it both meaning and brilliance. The same sustained tension runs through the writing of Chakra, the only quartet by Allain Gaussin whose splendor the Jack Quartet revealed: that of the spectacular metamorphoses of a material forged on the 16 strings of the quartet treated here as a meta-instrument. The bows are dazzlingly virtuosic within a trajectory requiring multiple playing modes, imagined by the composer to act on the sound and distort it until saturation. The central part diffuses a strange light, diffracted in a beam of lines which gradually reinvest all the space of resonance over the course of a process that the Jack Quartet carries through to the very impressive “cut” end. After a few pages of Rodericus whose Jack Quartet, in the second part, married the elegant turns of the "Ars subtilior", Tetras, the second quartet of Xenakis, written 20 years after ST/4, decided cleanly. The composer from Bohor here transfers the morphologies of electroacoustic music into the instrumental writing of the quartet whose space he pulverizes. This music agitated like the elements of nature – a raging sea as Xenakis liked it, or a devastating tornado – is full of energy under the extraordinary bows of the Jack Quartet. The work draws a chaotic trajectory strewn with pitfalls, in glissandi, brutal shocks and other flashes, approaching new lands, virgin and vivacious, those of the Unheard of which Xenakis was calling for and which the Jack Quartet revealed to us this evening. .