New York Times - July 21, 2018
Review of Reza Vali’s “Ormavi”
Carpe Diem String Quartet
Whenever possible I spend a week of my summers at a chamber music course in Bennington, Vt., swapping my critic’s pen for a violin bow. It’s a joyful experience — but humbling, too, as I struggle to match the sounds I produce to the ones I hear in concerts all year long. An embarrassingly large chunk of my coaching sessions are given over to tweaking the intonation of, say, Debussy’s String Quartet. So it was with awe and a pang of envy that I listened on Wednesday to the premiere of Reza Vali’s “Ormavi,” performed by the Carpe Diem String Quartet, whose members are here on the faculty.
The work takes its title from a 13th-century Persian music theorist and uses some of the ancient modes he codified. Where the Western scale is broken down into 12 equidistant steps, these modes are built from irregular intervals requiring the performers to internalize spaces that differ microscopically from the quarter tones sometimes called for in contemporary compositions. The resulting music was vibrant and richly expressive, with the quartet often acting as a single multihued instrument. Much of the music plays with — and slyly undermines — the concept of unison, with players tracing almost identical melodic contours or sustaining high pitches a hair’s-width apart. The resulting interference created washes of brilliant, throbbing color. Delicate pizzicato movements evoked the filigree wisps of Persian calligraphy.
The Carpe Diem players turned in a fiery and flexible performance that was astonishingly free given the unfamiliar tuning system. Here were four musicians who had thrown their hard-won concepts of Western intonation overboard in order to learn a new language to the point beyond fluency, where they communicated with eloquence and zest.
CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM