The cover art of this album, with posters of the well-coiffed Lark Quartet on a wall bearing the title "Klap Ur Handz," written graffiti-style, fairly screams the radical chic of the 1960s. The music inside, however, is better than that. Like other chamber groups in the line descended from San Francisco's Kronos Quartet, the women of the Lark Quartet set out to mix concert music with contemporary vernacular materials, and the chief attraction of this album is that they choose interesting examples of each and play them with ...
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The cover art of this album, with posters of the well-coiffed Lark Quartet on a wall bearing the title "Klap Ur Handz," written graffiti-style, fairly screams the radical chic of the 1960s. The music inside, however, is better than that. Like other chamber groups in the line descended from San Francisco's Kronos Quartet, the women of the Lark Quartet set out to mix concert music with contemporary vernacular materials, and the chief attraction of this album is that they choose interesting examples of each and play them with accuracy and vigor. The program succeeds in being diverse, unexpected, and logical all at the same time. The presence of one of the "serious" works of P.D.Q. Bach creator Peter Schickele is a surprise, yet the kinetic, Slavic scherzo of his String Quartet No. 2, "In Memoriam," is an ideal overture. The quartet gets the personal lyricism of current critical favorite Paul Moravec just right. The arrangements of Gershwin songs for quartet by Broadway composer Stanley Silverman stress...
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