Music Reviews : Anderson Quartet Plays Singleton Work

Alvin Singleton’s brand-new “Somehow We Can,” which received its world premiere performance last week in North Carolina, was given a first West Coast hearing on the program of the Anderson Quartet at Cal State Los Angeles on Saturday night.

The new work, which the Anderson ensemble will play at its New York debut Feb. 27, seems to be a 13-minute essay in atonal concision, fragmentation and eclecticism. As performed in the roomy, acoustically welcoming Theatre at the Luckman Fine Arts Center, it made its points progressively, moving from fanfare through chorale and crisis to repose, using the power of drones, buzzes, tremolos, trills and crescendos as propellant.

The 54-year-old American composer is no minimalist, yet he wastes no notes on empty rhetoric; this music speaks, even with grand pauses, an expansive idiom.

In any other context, it would not be important to mention that Singleton is black. The fact has relevance, however, since this piece was commissioned by the Eastman School of Music, “in memory of Marian Anderson,” the namesake of this string quartet.

Also, since the four players--violinists Marianne Henry and Marisa McLeod, violist Diedra Lawrence, cellist Michael Cameron--refer to their quartet as “the first African American musical ensemble of any kind to win a major competition” (the Cleveland Quartet Competition, in 1991). It should also be mentioned that the guest artist Saturday, playing in Mozart’s G-minor Quintet, K. 516, was another black musician, violist Amahdi Hummings.

In pure musical terms, no hurdles have been lowered here. The youngish quartet plays with all the promise, accomplishment and hotshotism of comparable peer groups. Their togetherness and single-mindedness is a fact, not a goal; they have controlled technique in abundance; intonation is reliable--although Saturday, the very end of their program showed some incipient fatigue.

They played Shostakovich’s exigent and exposing Eighth Quartet with drama and authority at the top of the evening. Their collaboration with Hummings netted Mozartean silver--gold will come. And they approached and tossed off the demanding Singleton piece--too bad there were no program notes, at least to explain its title, if not its workings--with aplomb. The Anderson Quartet remains in residence at CSLA through 1996.