Prismatic Americanism: As Ensemble Music's guest, Aeolus Quartet explores what we are

With Dvorak's last quartet as an anchor, both for its foreign perspective and its nostalgia for old, familiar

Aeolus takes its name from the Greek god of winds.

milieus, the Aeolus String Quartet made its first local appearance Wednesday night at the Indiana History Center. "Inspired by America" was the concert's title.

As the second group on Ensemble Music Society's current season, Aeolus led up to the Bohemian master's String Quartet in G major, op.106, with three modern works by American composers — George Walker, Jessie Montgomery, and Ben Johnston.

The prominent African-American Walker wrote a piece that became known as "Lyric for Strings" in its string orchestra version. As the second movement of his first string quartet, it sounds very much like apprentice work. The basic appeal of the material has allowed the piece to succeed, maybe not on the transcendent level of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" (similarly lifted from an early string-quartet original), but enough to keep Walker's name before the public.

It was tucked in between more interesting pieces. Montgomery's "Strum" is a well-integrated tribute to vernacular string styles: incisive bowing, tight and intelligible harmonies, and of course the recurrent pizzicato articulation signaled by the work's title. The musicians — violinists Nicholas Tavani and Rachel Shapiro, violist Caitlin Lynch, and cellist Jia Kim — displayed the same coordinated bounce, phrase after phrase, that was evident from when they first sprang onstage all smiles.

"Just intonation" is the key to understanding the sound of Johnston's String Quartet No. 4 ("Amazing Grace"), but it has a freshness of invention that goes beyond both the familiar hymn on which it is based and the tuning system that Johnston uses, following a career-long interest in microtones. The instruments are tuned to represent the pure spacing of pitch, without the compromises that blur the outlines between pitch relationships so that all tonalities can be smoothly negotiated and no intervals are jarring.

The work placed a premium on the quartet's virtuosity. The Aeolus lived up to its name insofar as each player embodied a "wind" from one of the four compass directions. The independence of each was expressed in rhythm as well as pitch. Yet collegial warmth seemed to emerge strongly as the music got complicated. That led to the climactic reemergence of "Amazing Grace" as a logical consequence of the preceding tumult, not a wrenching re-imposition of the tune. Johnston's innovative procedures never seemed to interfere with communication of a beloved melody transformed.

After intermission came the piece that suggests "inspired by America" most crucially. Dvorak's American period brought forth the blend of homesickness and welcoming encounter most famously represented by the "New World" Symphony. His "American" Quartet is well-known, but the two final quartets (opp. 105 and 106) are thoroughly a product of his resettled, post-American life, which ended within a decade of his return to Prague.

The G major quartet, lavish in its development of rich materials and emotionally intricate, drew an intense, stimulating performance from the Aeolus.  

Especially impressive was the control displayed in the second movement, giving the slow, and slowly changing, music plenty of room to breathe. The emotional range is immense, and was fully explored in this performance. The motoric drive of the finale never threw the collective focus out of alignment. It was no wonder that in their final curtain call, the musicians simply waved goodbye. It was the friendliest refusal to play an encore, and it's likely nobody minded.