A HOMECOMING

Their latest recording gathers new music and 20th-century works by US composers, but the Miró Quartet musicians are always mindful of melodic accessibility. Harry White hears from cellist Joshua Gindele about the group’s commissioning process and recording the album

The musicians of the Miró Quartet know what they like and aren’t ashamed to say. ‘We champion modern voices; and the notion of melody, of a work being tuneful, is so important to us,’ says cellist Joshua Gindele. ‘We want audiences to realise that not all contemporary compositions have to be challenging.

That they can, in fact, be – for want of a better word – pleasant,’ he laughs.

‘Or they might use familiar harmonies and language. To learn new music is challenging; it takes a lot of hours. We strive to commission works by composers we know have legs, and that we can keep playing over the course of a season.’

The Miró’s latest album for Pentatone, Home, is an unapologetic celebration of this value. It features commissions from Caroline Shaw and Kevin Puts in addition to Barber’s canonic op.11 and a movement by George Walker. At what point did the quartet – also comprising violinists Daniel Ching and William Fedkenheuer, and violist John Largess – realise its collective admiration for accessibility? ‘It became very obvious early on,’ explains Gindele. ‘When we were younger, we were presented with lots of opportunities to play new works. And often we didn’t have that kind of autonomy over who wrote them and what they sounded like. I think we’d spent enough time spinning our wheels learning things that were perfectly good but didn’t resonate with us. So, we had very candid and honest conversations about commissioning. But it’s important to add that you should take these things I say about lyricism, melody, rhythm and harmony with a grain of salt. For example, a lot of the work that Kevin wrote for us is pretty thorny; it’s just that the music doesn’t stay in that place the whole time. Ultimately, we’d just had so much experience of playing music that didn’t resonate with us that we decided that commissioning would give us a certain amount of control over things: who writes it, where it’s played – and so on.’

JEFF WILSON

‘IT’S ALWAYS BEEN A GOAL OF OURS THAT WE TRY TO FURTHER THE ART AND HAVE MODERN VOICES BEING HEARD CONSISTENTLY’

The Miró’s clarity of aesthetic is, of course, coupled to its commitment to modernity. ‘I think we must have commissioned one work, maybe two, per season for our whole career, since we started thirty years ago,’ says Gindele. ‘And the inspiration actually came from studying with the Juilliard Quartet, who added such a rich body of works to the canon that still exist. They even presented the first ever public cycle of Bartók’s quartets. It’s pretty wild the kind of people they worked with and the pieces they were able to add! Sure, we have an incredible repertoire as a string quartet; it’s endless, really. And there’s a ton even in the standard canon that we haven’t played. But it’s always been a goal of ours that we try to further the art and have modern voices being heard consistently.’

Back to the album, and of Shaw’s Microfictions vol.1 and Puts’s Home Gindele explains, ‘Both were works we had initially commissioned to tour with. As we travelled with them, we were also playing the Walker and the Barber, and we realised that each of these composers was not only American but also had won a Pulitzer Prize! That conscious recognition was really how the idea for the album came about. There were interesting juxtapositions within the concept, too. Shaw was very young when she won, whereas George Walker, who was the first African-American composer ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, didn’t win it until he was in his seventies. Also, looking at American music over the course of a hundred or so years and celebrating this journey – this was interesting for us.’ Of course, the four works are also connected by the thread of honouring melodicism. ‘When we commission composers, we do so because they usually have a keen sense of melody and weave something that touches us,’ says Gindele. ‘It’s mostly not very austere writing; we tend not to dig into the more thorny classical composers that maybe other quartets do! So, these works are linked by their wonderful melodic quality, although there is obviously tremendous diversity of expression here, too.’

Given the vast quantity of new works the Miró engages in, there is presumably quite a process now for commissioning. ‘Oh, for sure. It’s very strategic,’ agrees Gindele. ‘Now that we’re a little more established and older, we mostly commission composers with whom we already have a personal relationship and who’ve shared with us a musical experience of some kind. We have a list; a consistent commissioning plan for many years to come, actually. We have funding, composers selected; we know what they’re doing. In fact, we’ve come to a different methodology from that which we practised in the past. Now, we put together consortiums of commissioners who co-commission works on our behalf.’ He continues: ‘What we love about this is that the pieces have longevity. For example, if you have one festival that is willing to commission a work for you and you play it at that festival, then the music doesn’t necessarily have a life beyond that; whereas if you have six or eight different concert promoters who each pitch in a sum of money to commission a work, then you play that piece six or eight times. The added advantage is that you get to know a work much better when you perform it more frequently, and the piece generally has a life after that, too. It adds to the value of the rehearsal hours you’ve spent getting to know a new work.’

Fittingly, and in a departure from their usual practice, the Miró musicians made the decision to record Home in their home town of Austin, Texas. ‘We actually decided to do the project at our classical radio station, KMFA,’ says Gindele. ‘They have this wonderful performance space. It’s not huge, but because of our relationship with them, which is really solid, they were very generous with letting us rent it. Ultimately, we returned home as it was convenient for how our lives were at that time, but the space was also appropriate for what we were doing.

‘Often, we’ve gone for quite large venues. Most of the Beethoven collection, for example, was recorded in a chapel that could seat about 800 people. KMFA seats about 150–200, which was a bit of a new experience for us. But the fact that it was smaller brought a little more clarity to the playing, which I think for contemporary American music is nice. You can tell when you listen to it that the space is more intimate. And honestly, for me, the convenience of it being local, of sleeping in my own bed and seeing my children, made it worth taking that risk with this album because it made the whole recording environment so much more pleasant.’

This album is surely something of a homecoming for the Miró, both geographically and aesthetically. But ‘home’ is as much about people as it is about place and feeling. ‘Indeed,’ says Gindele, ‘and we had the same engineer that we used for our Beethoven cycle and all of our Schubert recordings – Da-Hong Seetoo – who, perhaps most famously, recorded a lot of the Emerson Quartet’s albums. He’s both produced and engineered this record and is someone we trust. He was a violin prodigy, studied at the Curtis Institute and has the most incredible ear. But he’s also very technically driven. Every time we work with him we know that we can just play; we never have to police ourselves, because he’s so sharp and his ear is so good that we know that if something doesn’t sound so good, or if there’s a bowing, fingering or slide that’s not working, he’s going to hear it. It puts us at ease, really; recording with him is just so simple.’

The Miró Quartet (l–r): Daniel Ching, Joshua Gindele, William Fedkenheuer and John Largess

KENNY CHEUNG

What does the quartet hope listeners will gain from the experience of this record? ‘All of these composers have their own voice in a very sincere and honest way,’ Gindele says. ‘But they are also all works that resonate with us. I feel that a really good collaboration between composer and performing artist is one where the voices of both are heard. Ultimately, we really hope that that’s what is communicated here.’