Reveiws

UPSTART LABEL DELIVERS A STIRRING CHAMBER-MUSIC CD

Fort Worth Business Press / February 14, 2005
By MIKE PRICE

The more intriguing and satisfying motion pictures tend to issue from artists unaligned with—or uncorrupted by—the major studios of Establishment Hollywood. So it goes, too, with the music industry.

Not only does that rule apply generally. The specific point here is that the most stirring and technically astute chamber-music recording of recent times has come from an upstart label in Fort Worth, showcasing a Denton-bred family of artists. Such developments as this make it easy to root for the home team.

Adkins String Ensemble, from Jabez Press, LLC., in Fort Worth, is the name of the collection, which contains an impeccably produced compact disk and a fully visualized in-performance DVD. The disks duplicate one another in terms of content—three stirring works, played with a stately passion—but stand apart from one another by virtue of the simple distinction between pure audio and the video-plus-audio presentation. The DVD offers sonic-contour choices among 24-bit stereophonic sound, Dolby digital 5.1 sound and high-definition stereo.

Consistently hailed by Dallas’ critical brethren as one of a handful of best acts to grace the stage of that city’s Meyerson Symphony Center, the Adkins String Ensemble is at once a throwback to the Euro-classical tradition of household musical ensembles and a progressive unit that defines the very concept of cultured provincialism. The same might be said of the Strauss and Bach clans, which combined artistic adventurousness with a natural affinity for shared performance.

The act of listening to the Adkinses, then, might be the closest possible thing to hearing the fire and unified technical assurance that history tells us belonged to the Bachs.

Dubbed “the state’s most potent musical clan” by the Dallas Morning News’ Olin Chisum, the Adkins String Ensemble has packed its new recording with one historically acknowledged masterwork, one fine rediscovery from early in the last century, and a recent composition of profound immediacy. These are Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 60 (1875); Frank Bridge’s Phantasy Piano Quartet in F-sharp Minor (1910); and Douglas Briley’s Quintet for a Healing Nation (2002). The artists neither modernize the historic works nor color the Briley selection with contrived antiquity; the point is to wrap the instruments snugly around each work to bring out its truer contours. Briley, for that matter, often seems to be channeling or re-interpreting Franz Liszt.

One suspects the Adkinses’ earlier performances of the 1990s might have been considered a novelty on first approach. The artists’ ages ranged at the time from around 15 to 35, and one published critic of the day seems to have found it a pleasant surprise that “they are superb performers who blend together as an ensemble of enormous sensitivity and precision.”

The qualities that proved self-evident in 1994 have become more of an indelible truth, all these years later.

The Adkinses are natives of Denton, and all experienced training at the University of North Texas, where their parents were faculty members. Having grown up in a tradition of family music-making, the siblings organized in 1993 to present a charity concert. The Meyerson debut followed in 1994.

In 1995, violinist Elisabeth Adkins’ husband, the concert pianist Edward Newman, joined the ensemble, with the result of a broadening of the repertoire. At length, with various individual members having settled into symphony-orchestra positions around the country, the Adkins String Ensemble launched its first professional season in 1999. The recording career began in 2001.

For Adkins String Ensemble (Jabez Press JP-98201), the artists have combined a bright and translucent production sound—like the artists themselves, the recording studio is home-grown, based in Mesquite—with a generally contemplative, if not necessarily brooding, program. Texas composer Douglas Briley had written the Quintet for a Healing Nation in response to the terrorist sieges of Sept. 11, 2001, but his meditations upon disaster are not so much graphic or mournful as they are inclined toward heroic defiance, compassion and a spiritual resurgence. The Quintet moves in a single-movement surge, somewhat contrary to its title, but its decisively demarcated sections do indeed number five.

Frank Bridge’s Phantasy Piano Quartet, as heard here, makes for a masterful rediscovery of a composer who practically had consigned himself to obscurity in his day—simply by altering his style dramatically (in response to the horrors of World War I, primarily) and thus alienating a set-in-its-ways musical establishment. The Quartet makes an emphatic introduction into a sequence of tiny, gemlike passages showcasing cello and piano, in particular.

The Brahms selection is rooted in the troubled history of the composer’s friendship with the mad genius Robert Schumann, and of Brahms’ unrequited love for Schumann’s widow. The turbulent emotionalism of the Piano Quartet No. 3 is particularly affecting in the Adkins performance, as much for its relentless cross-currents of yearning and devotion as for its more fiery passages.

One simply will not find a finer or more involving chamber-music recording.

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