Marian Anderson String Quartet honour their namesake in New York

Marian Anderson (1897-1993) was a much-admired American contralto, a symbol in the civil rights struggle and, in 1955, the first black singer to appear at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1992 she graciously lent her name to a young string quartet of black women. Today, the Marian Anderson String Quartet, based in Texas, has established an honourable place for itself on the national and international scene.

It retains two of its founding members — first violinist Marianne Henry and violist Diedra Lawrence. The second violinist, Nicole Cherry, and the cellist, Prudence McDaniel, are by now longstanding too.

To honour their namesake, the quartet presented a programme on Friday in the smaller space of New York’s 92nd Street Y, Buttenwieser Hall, as part of the Eastman School of Music’s Gateways Festival. Entitled On Being Enslaved, the evening offered various short, more or less germane scores by mostly white composers that related to Anderson, who herself sang music from opera to spirituals.

The “narrative arc” of the music, explained at the outset by Lawrence, began with Rhiannon Giddens’s “At the Purchaser’s Option with Variations”, a folk song from her 2017 Nonesuch album as arranged for the Kronos Quartet by Jacob Garchik. The words were unheard here but scary: the “option” of the title concerns whether a slave buyer chose to include a nine-month-old baby in his purchase.

Jonathan McNair’s Follow the Drinking Gourd, the score for a musical collaboration about the underground railroad, wove instrumental textures around three subjects, spirituals or spiritual-like. Samuel Adler’s “In Memoriam: Marian Anderson” and David Wallace’s “In Honor of Marian Anderson” did the same.

All this sounded pleasant but bland, untouched by modernism. The ominous beginning of the Adler offered a welcome hint of disquiet, but even the Giddens sounded oddly cheerful. 

Whether Dvořák’s “American” Quartet No 12, after the intermission, counts as musically American is a subject for discussion. It was composed in 1893, right after the New World symphony, and attested to Dvořák’s conviction that the future of American music lay in the country’s black and indigenous traditions. But the quartet’s actual music sounds pretty Dvořákian. The Anderson players dug into the score with passion and technical accomplishment.

The programme ended with a minute-long arrangement for string quartet of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”, the hymn dating from 1900 that became known as the “negro national anthem” — symbolically appropriate if musically anticlimactic. Rather like the concert itself.

★★★☆☆

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