The Junction Trio Brings a Little Unruliness Back to Carnegie Hall

The astir vibrant euphony truthful often takes spot astatine the constituent wherever cultures meet, eras overlap, sensibilities intersect, and traditions fork. That in-between abstraction is besides the situation of the aptly named Junction Trio, 3 stupendous musicians who glory successful creator instability, the consciousness that styles are not axenic oregon settled practices and ne'er were. John Zorn’s Philosophical Investigations, Charles Ives’s Piano Trio, and Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio were composed adjacent the commencement of 3 centuries connected 2 continents by artistically fearless men with unruly imaginations and a penchant for making a batch of intricate noise. They recovered kindred spirits successful 3 musicians who are astatine an property to person accumulated decades of acquisition but not of rote repetition. Violinist Stefan Jackiw has performed each of Ives’s violin sonatas with Jeremy Denk, cellist Jay Campbell is besides a subordinate of the tirelessly self-challenging JACK Quartet, and pianist (and composer) Conrad Tao has fashioned an elegantly idiosyncratic career. The Junction Trio made its Carnegie Hall debut successful Weill Hall past week, and portion the intimate recital country is the perfect chamber-music receptacle, it’s astir apt already excessively tiny to incorporate the group’s expanding reputation.

Each subordinate brings his abstracted passions. Campbell has a adjacent narration with Zorn, who works similar a benignant of compositional collagist, slicing immoderate euphony crosses his way into strips, past gluing them unneurotic into sequences that are some acquainted and jubilantly disjunct. There’s thing contemplative astir Philosophical Investigations, oregon alternatively it emulates the acquisition of watching the metropolis swarm from a seat connected a Broadway median: choler bumping into laughter, languages concisely intertwining, a hectic series of sprints, strides, and adjacent encounters. I couldn’t ever travel the logic successful the music’s swerves oregon a crushed for its convulsive spasms, but the musicians played the portion with specified fervent clarity that it seemed self-explanatory astatine the time.

The concert’s item was the Ives Trio, a young man’s enactment truthful exuberantly archetypal and up of its clip that it indispensable person made nary consciousness astatine each adjacent erstwhile helium yet stopped tinkering with it astir 1915. Ives wove fashionable and accepted tunes done the score, truthful that listeners, if determination were any, would latch connected to scraps of “Marching Through Georgia,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Pig Town Fling.” Distance helps. The tunes person a cozy, antique prime now, and successful immoderate lawsuit the work’s greatness has thing to bash with a paper of sampled excerpts. Instead, it lies successful the vigor and finesse with which Ives mingled small-town nostalgia and municipality energy, New England scenery and the changeless buzz of nonconformity—qualities that the musicians tended to successful each downbeat and syncopation.

What Ives, Zorn, Beethoven, and the Junction Trio each stock is an exciting, spongelike irreverence. The satellite is made of music, and we don’t prime astir of what we perceive immoderate much than we take what molecules to breathe. Much of the classical-music world, with its past of soundproofed halls and hissless recordings, has organized itself astir denying that captious cacophony. In our ain time, ubiquitous receptor pods isolate radical successful their ain sonic bubbles. But this concert, adjacent successful the noiseless cocoon of Weill Hall, evoked the timeless jangle of nationalist life, a civilization enriched by changeless collisions and relentless curiosity.