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Ives,  Kevin Puts and Dvořák: Miró Quartet,Weill Recital Hall, New York City, 23. 1.2009 (BH)

Charles Ives: String Quartet No. 1, "From the Salvation Army" (c. 1902)
Kevin Puts: Credo (2007, New York Premiere)
Antonín Dvořák: String Quartet No. 2 in F Major, Op. 96, "American" (1893)

Miró Quartet
Daniel Ching, Violin
Sandy Yamamoto, Violin
John Largess, Viola
Joshua Gindele, Cello


Two American works and one homage to the country made an enormously satisfying program by the Miró Quartet, currently the Faculty String Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin.  Starting at 7:30 on the dot in Weill Recital Hall the foursome strode out and plunged into a gutsy reading of Ives's First String Quartet, "From the Salvation Army," which is packed with familiar hymn tunes.  Yet Ives never presents them with the intent to sing along; one marvels at how the well-known choruses splinter and collide.  The final movement sounds like some national anthem, but sung by a group of people who have only learned the first few measures of each page.

Composer Kevin Puts was inspired by disparate events for his lyrical Credo: the shop of a stringed instrument dealer in Katonah, New York; jogging along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh; and from his apartment window in New York, watching a mother teaching her daughter how to dance.  As one friend remarked, Credo resembles a "new cavatina" in its gentle evocations.  It is an episodic work: now mellow, now biting.  Strains of Bach float by, like someone practicing just outside the door.  At least in this performance, Ives was positioned as one of Puts's spiritual ancestors: bristling yet reverent, each with an ear able to capture images drifting by with casual precision.

The concert concluded with a stirring reading of Dvořák's String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, the "American," written the same year as his Ninth Symphony, "From the New World," and their similarities are surely no accident.  If the opening Allegro has the strength of overhead trestles, the Lento that follows feels like a nocturne under the Brooklyn Bridge.  The exuberant third movement feels like an immigrant boat tossing in a stormy sea, before the fizzy affirmation of the finale.  Throughout the program the four musicians played with a blend of honey and grit; even the most lyrical passages had a slight patina. 

For an encore, the group wanted to present "something a little different," and pulled out Jerome Kern's "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," sounding for all the world as if it had been arranged by Astor Piazzolla.  As Elizabeth Bergman wrote in her notes, "Ives wanted audiences to hear in his contemporary harmonies and strikingly original turns of phrase the comforting strains of the long familiar."  That is not a bad summation of the entire evening.

Bruce Hodges


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