The Adventures of Hippocrates

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Genre: Classical Music
Media Format: Compact Disk
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Release Date: 18-APR-2006

These three works were commissioned for the Orion Quartet by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival where the group is in residence, in collaboration with the summer festivals at La Jolla and Caramoor. Though the composers were born within one decade, their musical language is entirely different. Corea's title piece is a "serious" work rooted in his jazz background and also influenced by 20th-century styles. Its five contrasting movements include a lilting, nostalgic Waltz, a plaintive lament and a fleet, scurrying run-around; there are jazzy syncopations, irregular rhythms, and sound effects like slap bass pizzicati.  What Hippocrates has to do with it is not explained. Neikrug's Piano Quintet explores "intervallic tensions." Its single movement is divided into sections of different lengths, character, mood, texture, and emotional content, building to climaxes of varying intensity and agitation. Punctuated by numerous deceptive endings, it seems rather long. Harbison's four-movement Quartet is structurally the most conventional but harmonically the most "modern" of these works. The cello and first violin dominate a swiftly-changing texture of sustained chords, singing lines, unisons, eerie whispers, sharp short notes, running passages, sound effects and charged silences. The Orion Quartet, renowned for its technical ease, tonal homogeneity, musical unanimity and versatility, plays these works with its usual beautiful warm, vibrant sound, security, passion, and stylistic empathy. Neikrug joins the group as pianist in his Quintet.   --Edith Eisler