By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • November 24, 2014
It's probably fair to say that Hans Abrahamsen is not the world’s most exciting composer. His music is deliberately spare, enigmatic, understated. It moves about as quickly as a glacier on valium. Simple musical gestures are repeated, and repeated, and then repeated some more. If you’re looking for drama or exuberance or gut-wrenching passion in music — or even just evidence of a pulse — this rather muted Danish composer may not be your cup of tea.
Hans AbrahamsenBut Abrahamsen has his champions, including the formidable young Jack Quartet, which performed all four of his string quartets on Sunday afternoon at the Phillips Collection as part of the gallery’s Leading European Composers series. The works trace an arc through the composer’s career, from the teenaged Quartet No. 1 (“Ten Preludes”) from 1973, to the gentle last quartet, completed in 2012 after 20 years of gestation, and often display considerable musical imagination and mastery of a range of styles.
Yet despite a committed performance from the Jack players, the overall effect was, in the end, underwhelming. Abrahamsen should be taken on his own terms, of course, and the distant, withheld writing that runs through these works has a certain serene beauty.
But there’s a fine line between transcendent minimalism and brain-crushing tedium, and the flashes of poetry and fire in Abrahamsen’s music often seemed to wash away in a sea of musical thumb-twiddling. Patience — much patience — was required, and in the end, little of importance seemed revealed.