Mark O'Connor's Quartets at Merkin Concert Hall

I won a pair of tickets in a drawing, giving me a selection among concerts presented at Merkin Concert Hall in New York.  The coincidence of available dates and interests thus led me and a friend to attend last night's performance of two string quartets by an ad hoc quartet made up of composer-violinist Mark O'Connor (playing second fiddle), Ida Kavafian, Paul Neubauer, and Matt Haimovitz.  O'Connor composed his Quartet No. 2 in 2005, and his Quartet No. 3 in 2008.  I believe these may have been first public performances - hard to tell from the incomplete program notes and the incoherent speakers prior to the music...

O'Connor is a practitioner of "crossover," the attempt to bridge the gap between classical and popular music.  In his case, he brings his skills and experience as an expert "country fiddler" to the table, adapts classical forms and techniques, and attempts to meld the two.  I thought the experiment worked better with the 3rd Quartet than the 2nd.  Both are in the same general style - an energetic blend of bluegrass and 20th century tonal classical composition.  O'Connor seems to have been heavily influenced by the so-called minimalist composers such as Reich and Glass, but he brings more variety to the table, in the manner of Adams.  I suspect he has also immersed himself in the Bartok quartets.  At any event, his writing is very listener friendly, he has a gift for melody, and the scoring for string quartet is expertly done.  Combining his skills with top-flight chamber musicians guarantees an interesting result.

That said, I thought the 2nd Quartet, which lasts about 40 minutes, was overextended in light of the musical interest of his materials.  Each of the movements seemed to go on a bit longer than need be to make its point.  I did not have the same feeling about the 3rd Quartet, so maybe it is a sign of his progress as a composer that he has come to realize the ideal length for the development of his ideas.  I felt that each of the movements in the 3rd Quartet, which lasts more like about 20 minutes, was concise and lasted no longer than the materials would support.  What would make sense would be for him to go back to the 2nd Quartet and ruthlessly edit it down to a similar length. 

These musicians have recorded the quartets, with the release imminent on O'Connor's own record label.  He was able to get a shipment in time to distribute copies, which were provided free to the audience at the end of the program.  On the one hand, I'm grateful for the opportunity to hear this music again.  On the other, I think it was premature to record them prior to their first performances, because an alert composer may hear things in a performance that he wishes to change before putting a work in its final form.  And I suspect that having performed the 2nd Quartet for an audience, if Mr. O'Connor is at all self-critical and retains any objectivity about his music, he may well want to make revisions.