Kreutzer Quartet - Gloria Coates: String Quartet No.9; Sonata for Violin Solo; Lyric Suite for Piano Trio (2010)

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Kreutzer Quartet - Gloria Coates: String Quartet No.9; Sonata for Violin Solo; Lyric Suite for Piano Trio (2010)

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I get the feeling that Gloria Coates does not spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not other people enjoy her music. That is a compliment, not a complaint. Whether or not you like what she does, she does it with a very personal style and with great conviction. The present CD, the fifth of Coates’s music to be released under Naxos’s American Classics imprint, ranks very low on the list of CDs one would play as light background music during a convivial dinner with friends. Coates’s music, this CD included, forces one to consider why we listen to music at all, and to examine what we mean by “entertainment.” To my thinking, entertainment, in the usual sense of the word, is overrated. We need to devote equal time and effort to moving ourselves into new emotional and intellectual territories, even at the risk of causing ourselves a little pain.

Coates is an American who now lives in Germany. In an interview, she describes the German culture as “very serious and formal,” and comments, “One is left alone much of the time unless he plans ahead.” Is there anyone in the United States who is writing music quite like Coates’s? Not that I am aware of. Her music says difficult things—things Americans seem unwilling to say at this point.

This is the world premiere recording of her recent (2007) String Quartet No. 9. The work is in two movements, both of them slow, and both of them making an almost obsessively detailed exploration of texture and sound. The first is a canon and nearly a palindrome, although the materials thus treated are not only melodic but also textural. The long, siren-like glissando, a trademark of Coates’s music from the start of her career, appears six minutes in and produces an unsettling effect. The listener also is thrown off kilter by pitch, because the first violin and the viola are tuned down one quarter-tone. Glissandos occur in the second movement, albeit within a narrower range; imagine listening to the slow movement of a late Beethoven quartet on a turntable whose motor is giving out and from an LP that has been pressed off-center. As Kyle Gann writes in his booklet notes, “The atmosphere is unworldly, creepily dissonant and yet serene, a kind of music of the spheres.”

The Sonata for Violin Solo (2000) allows aspects of Coates’s compositional style to stand out in stark relief. The movement titles—Prelude, Fantasia, Berceuse, and Hornpipe—suggest Handel or Bach, or at any rate more “traditional” composers, but once again, Coates goes her own fascinating way.

One might think that Emily Dickinson would elicit a brighter response from any composer. All of the Lyric Suite’s (1996) seven movements are headed by a fragment from Dickinson’s poetry. The Belle of Amherst was a mystic and a visionary, though, and Coates’s music underscores the notion that much of Dickinson’s work was actually quite strange, considering the time and place in which she lived. Once again, unusual playing techniques, including strings tuned a quarter-tone flat, create a sound world that is eerily beautiful and queasy.

For Coates newbies, any of the discs featuring her orchestral works might be a slightly easier introduction. Nevertheless, I feel that the present CD is an honest representation of who she is and what she does.

The Kreutzer Quartet has participated in earlier Coates recordings, and the quartet’s first violinist, Peter Sheppard Skærved, has championed Coates for her music for two decades. (Neil Heyde is the quartet’s cellist.) It is hard to know what to say about the performances, except that there would be little point in performing and recording this music if one didn’t believe in it. Separately and together, the quartet’s members, plus pianist Chadwick, are committed to the task, and carry it out with deep concentration.

As usual, the cover art is a painting by Gloria Coates, whose visual art looks much like her music sounds. As the saying goes, when God gave out talent, she stood in line twice.

Review by Raymond Tuttle, FANFARE

A composer with 15 symphonies to her credit could be categorised as an artist who always thinks on a large scale. But think again where Gloria Coates is concerned. An American who has been based in Munich for four decades, Coates has shown on Naxos discs of eight string quartets that she also brings a bold, inventive and ethereal creative spirit to intimate works.

The newest recording of Coates’s chamber music comprises her striking Ninth String Quartet and arresting pieces for solo violin and piano trio, all given incisive and expressive performances by the Kreutzer Quartet and company. It’s clear from these scores that the composer deeply respects the past even as she takes intriguing sonic detours.

String Quartet No 9 exemplifies Coates’s distinctive language, which subtly embraces micro-tonal details and other techniques in narratives that seize the ear and never let go. In the expansive first movement, the strings begin in Bach-like fashion before weaving an extraordinary fabric of glissando passages.

Like the quartet, the disc’s remaining works are dark in atmosphere and rich in content. The Sonata for Solo Violin travels through myriad mystical realms in four movements exploring the instrument’s poetic and acrobatic possibilities. The vocabulary is more tonal, though coloured by Coates’s characteristic tweaks of pitch, harmony and effect, in the Lyric Suite for Piano Trio, whose subtitle, “Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music” comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson. The seven movements abound in material of glistening and moody impact.

Review by Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone

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Kreutzer Quartet - Gloria Coates: String Quartet No.9; Sonata for Violin Solo; Lyric Suite for Piano Trio (2010)

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Kreutzer Quartet - Gloria Coates: String Quartet No.9; Sonata for Violin Solo; Lyric Suite for Piano Trio (2010)

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