Search - Kevin Volans :: Kevin Volans: Hunting: Gathering

Two sides of Kevin Volans well presented

Sparky P. | composer, all around nice guy, yada yada yada | 08/04/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"To me Kevin Volans' string quartets are the best since Elliott Carter's five (and I hope that Mr. Carter will be able to get to a sixth one too). The two composers have taken the well established (and far far from being cliched) medium and made it distinctly their own. This disc presents three of Volans' seven [as of 3/06: ten] string quartets (nos. 3-5, plus a short separate quartet movement, are out of print but very well worth seeking out; the most recent quartets, 7-10, have not yet been recorded). This disc shows two sides of Volans in his composing career. In this corner there is the African Volans, represented by Quartets 1&2. They both offer a wealth of material from not only his South African homeland, but from the entire continent as well, and presented in a "non-pretentious New Age" manner. The first quartet is a series dance rhythms, while the second one could be seen as a Charles Ives channeling of indigenous material, the way ideas quickly follow each other or are juxtaposed. In the other corner there is the Abstract Volans, greatly influenced by Morton Feldman, blurring the lines of stillness and motion. The 6th String Quartet was written for live string quartet and a taped version of itself (similar to Steve Reich's Different Trains and Triple Quartet). The material is shared between both entities so that the source and its echo becomes blurred. There is very little motion to speak of. Whereas the 1st and 2nd quartets present a plethora of material, the 6th Quartet has only a handful of ideas at most and could easily proceed endlessly like Feldman's 2nd String Quartet if it had wanted to (and the folks who commissioned it allowed it to). There is so little there, just for the most part a toggling between two chords, usually based on fifths. Yet there is that feeling of motion and progression amongst the stillness, a feeling relief, elation, floating. My personal favorite Volans quartet is his Fourth (the second movement I see as some of the best music Feldman never wrote), complementing nos. 2&6, but as I said, his entire quartet oeuvre is quite marvelous in toto. And besides the Duke Quartet always play Volans very well (they have recorded all but no.3; I hope they are working on that along with nos.7-10)."