CHICAGO — The state of the new music scene here is strong, if last weekend is anything to go by.
It was the climax of the first Frequency Festival, conceived by the writer Peter Margasak as an expansion of his Frequency Series, a Sunday-night feature heard regularly at the drink-and-listen space Constellation. Orbiting around Constellation but also taking in other spots around the city last week, the festival presented mostly local performers (some nationally prominent, others headed that way) in seven concerts, of which I caught three.
All were formidable, none more so than the Spektral Quartet’s free Sunday afternoon show at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago. The foursome of Austin Wulliman, Clara Lyon, Doyle Armbrust and Russell Rolen focuses on new music, but isn’t beholden to it. Their latest, chirpy release on the Sono Luminus label, “Serious Business,” quizzically looks at musical humor through three works from the last two years, and a fourth by an up-and-comer named Franz Josef Haydn.
Straiter laces prevailed here for an engrossing program, “Prismatic Memory.” The quartet proved that they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily; a capacity to make complicated music clear; and, most notably on this occasion, an ability to cast a magic spell of silence over a restless, gallery-going audience.
The first potion was the premiere of “Bagatellen” (2015) by Hans Thomalla, who teaches at Northwestern University. In the third of nine tight, hushed miniatures, a trill was stretched out, slowly obliterated; in the fourth, a chorale became immobile, yet still comprehensible; the last was a brushing arioso, bowed on the instruments’ bodies, necks and tuning pegs.
The players brought a similarly un-self-conscious approach to the extended techniques in Beat Furrer’s String Quartet No. 3 (2004), an enveloping, bona fide masterpiece that stretches over 50 uninterrupted minutes. For some reason, the reputation of the Swiss-born Mr. Furrer has not properly crossed the Atlantic. It should.
What’s most remarkable about this quartet is its sense of plot, albeit one that’s halting, recursive and indeterminate. As the program book noted, the composer compares its structure to a film about a man who, having lost his short-term memory, tries to piece together the story of the murder of his wife. I thought of a long, tired hike to the middle of nowhere, one’s mind the only company.
There’s no resolution in this sound world of pizzicato, slices and shudders. The quartet seems to fixate, to forget, to fret, continually searching for something hovering frustratingly but perceptibly out of reach.
Toward the end, a shimmering chorale from 1542 obliquely appears, the unheard text of which translates to:
You hear me not
at night I find no peace
for you conceal
as much as it pains me
your countenance.
But these ancient strains disintegrate, long before the whole hymn is heard. Is the chorale an interloper, or an opportunity missed? It’s unclear — and in that ambiguity lies the work’s power.
Fullerton Hall is an inviting 1898 auditorium, but it can’t be the dedicated venue that the contemporary-minded deserve. Constellation has become a home for the young and inquisitive, the local equivalent of New York’s SubCulture or National Sawdust. Replete with exposed insulation, metal pipework and dim lighting, it’s about five miles northwest of downtown, beneath a viaduct and around the corner from a gas station. Blink, and you’ll walk straight past it.
Friday’s concert there was split into two sets. The first, given by the exuberant Meehan/Perkins Duo of percussionists (Todd Meehan and Doug Perkins), included works by Courtney Brown and John Fitz Rogers, but centered on the absorbing premiere of Alex Wroten’s “Mosaic” (2015), which glistens as it seems to rotate, less developing than slowly revealing more of its secrets.
They were followed by the flutist Tim Munro, formerly of the garlanded ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Gently lit by Eleanor Kahn, he began a four-year project to play Salvatore Sciarrino’s revolutionary collection for flute, “L’opera,” with captivating accounts of the flickering, shadowy “All’aure in una lontanza” and the more outlandish “Come vengono prodotti gli incantesimi?” In between came Mr. Munro’s own “Last Exit,” an agonized ratcheting of tension based on a poem by Samuel Wagan Watson that indicts enduring Australian racism.
Last, on Sunday evening, came the versatile, inimitable Ensemble Dal Niente, in one of its popular, provocative “Hard Music, Hard Liquor” gigs. Conducted by Michael Lewanski, George Lewis’s battering, adamant “Mnemosis” (2012) and “Hexis” (2013) flanked three solo pieces. Both Mr. Furrer’s absurdly difficult “Solo” (1999) for cello — Chris Wild, insatiable — and Richard Barrett’s “Interference” (2000) for contrabass clarinet — Alejandro Acierto, equally so — used the voice to break down the distinction between player and played. Sivan Cohen Elias’s “Hack” (2016) for two guitars, on the other hand, deconstructed the instruments themselves, laying them prostrate as Jesse Langen threaded wires through their strings, or lifted them to shred a bow along them.
Hard music? Absolutely: to play and, at times, to hear. Hard liquor? I wouldn’t know.