Aqua Reviews
Chicago Classical Review
“Harold Meltzer responds to the undulating surface of architect Jeanne Gang’s distinctive Chicago skyscraper of the same name…. The music had a sense of constant rhythmic pulse, but at any given moment violinists Blaise Magniere and Marie Wang, violist Anthony Devroye and cellist Cheng-Hou Lee swirled and danced away in syncopated riffs. Their melodies sounded spicy and unpredictable but always driven by an undercurrent of seamless flow and forward momentum. Like the surface of Gang’s apartment building, Meltzer’s Aqua was full of energy with few sharp edges.”
The Birmingham News
“If music has the capacity to elicit a three-dimensional vision, this was it. With little imagination on the listeners’ part, Meltzer connected palpably to architect Jeanne Gang’s 86-story, 859-foot Chicago high-rise, Aqua Tower. Waves of arpeggios, glistening warmth, darkening shadows and splashes of light conjured the passage of clouds and sun on the building’s exterior, its billowing balconies undulating softly through slowly unfolding dissonant harmonies.
“Meltzer, who spoke to the audience about his compositional process, compared it with the haystacks Monet pained at various seasons and times of day. Like the tower, this music lifted and soared, if only in the imagination. If, as Goethe contended, architecture is frozen music, Meltzer has provided a thawing mechanism.”
The New York Times
“The concert ended with Harold Meltzer’s Aqua, a boldly episodic string quartet lasting 20 minutes. In various sections the strings play aggressive, astringent arpeggios, break into spiky chords, then segue into meditative stretches of tart yet celestial harmonies, and more. Over all, the music comes across as at once exhilarating and dangerous.”
New Music Buff
“The first is Aqua (2011-12) which is inspired by the architecture of the so-called Aqua building in Chicago by architect Jeanne Gang. In a city known for its fine architecture this 2007 building manages to stand out in its uniqueness. Need I say that his piece suggests impressionism. It’s string writing is complex with a vast mixture of effects that, under the interpretive skill of the Avalon String Quartet, suggest movement in much the way the building itself does. This is genius, the ability to mix all these string techniques into a coherent whole. It is a basically tonal work and it is seriously engaging but listener friendly in the end.”
Voix des Arts
“Aqua for string quartet is a musical response to the visual and spatial impact of Aqua Tower, a residential building at 225 N. Columbus Drive in Chicago’s Lakeshore East development that was designed and built under the supervision of a team headed by noted architect Jeanne Gang. Meltzer’s writing in Aqua is as intrinsically ‘vocal’ as in his song cycles, the interactions among instruments here probing the metaphysical implications of an edifice’s marriages of earth and sky, steel and glass, public and private. One of the most intriguing aspects of Meltzer’s artistry is his gift for fabricating gossamer strands of sound that metamorphose into vast vistas. The performance of Aqua by Avalon String Quartet on this disc is a celebration of musical camaraderie, the instruments’ timbres combining to produce an engrossing sonic silhouette of Aqua Tower. The ways in which Meltzer’s part writing exploits traditional tonal relationships are reminiscent of Arvo Pärt’s syntheses of plainsong. The Avalon musicians are clearly as aware of their colleagues’ playing as of their own. They are also unmistakably aware of how Aqua dissolves the boundaries between visible monuments to man’s ambitions and the intangible pursuit of community.”
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
“The string quartet movement “Aqua” is a bit of a tour de force, with well conceived attention to the sound color and expressive possibilities of the four strings. There is a one-on-one overlap of noteful content and colorful execution that gets a glowingly sunny reading by the Avalon String Quartet. Mellifluous exertion and reposeful flow of calm reflection alternate and run one into the other in ways that mark the work as very original and moving.”
The Art Music Lounge
“It’s fascinating music, and although the quartet is not divided into movements on the CD it is clearly divided into discrete sections. The second is less “flowing” more rhythmic. In this purely instrumental piece, Meltzer wrote in a starker and more abstract manner, avoiding lyricism in favor of describing what he saw in musical terms. Nonetheless it is quite good, well-developed and fascinating to hear on its own terms, even if one were not aware of the physical building used as its inspiration. Interestingly, where Bride of the Island was recorded in an ambient acoustic, Aqua seemed to have been recorded with very tight sound, which allows for fewer overtones in the quartet’s playing, yet in a way this helps one focus on the intricacies of the music. One section almost had a sort of bluegrass beat to it, though the music itself is anything but bluegrass, and in another the rhythms are jagged and rough. An excellent and highly original piece!”