Bergamot Quartet, Tercel, Spare, and Blood Red River
The Cave
Chapel Hill, N.C.
2/16/24
People filed into the Cave on W. Franklin Ave. in Chapel Hill and quickly filled the narrow space, gathering around to listen. “Sleep Walk” played on the sound system. Strangers made friends with strangers as they got change from the bartender in the hopes of playing pool. Near the stage, a man in glasses with a white beard smiled. “I’ve never seen a string quartet at the Cave before. I’ve seen just about every other kind.”
The group in question was the Bergamot Quartet — Ledah Finck and Sarah Thomas on violins, Amy Tan on viola, and Irene Han on cello — who, according to the quartet’s website, are “fueled by a passion for exploring and advocating for the music of living composers, continually expanding the limits of the string quartet’s rich tradition in western classical music. With a priority given to music by women, they aim to place this new, genre-bending music in meaningful dialogue with the histories that precede it.”
But the quartet’s appearance at the Cave, a club better known for amplified music — like the three bands that were slated for later in the evening — wasn’t a stunt. It was a homecoming, and a strong reminder that chamber music was as much written for informal spaces as for concert halls.
“I used to live here, so it’s really nice to be here,” Finck said, and began the quartet’s set with Anna Roberts-Gevalt’s “After Lester,” based on a West Virginia fiddle tune. The sounds of the instruments filled the space. Someone began talking and was shushed, but in the Cave, life also went on. There were the sounds of the bartender tending bar, and a quiet conversation in the back.
The quartet then dove into an energetic piece written by Finck, “The Division of Knowledge,” that demanded more attention. It grew out of insistent pizzicato, with searching, cascaded phrases that unfolded into more lyrical melodies and denser harmonies. As the piece continued, the players pushed the tone of their instruments, serving the piece’s urgency. It ended in a burst of sound that drew first a breath from the audience, then applause.
Finck then explained that they would dip further back in time to play a piece from “badass” composer Fanny Mendelssohn, too often overshadowed by her brother, “a certain Felix.” They would play from a quartet she wrote — Finck implying that she probably wrote more than one, but they are lost — focusing on the last movement because “it is a bop.” Finck wasn’t wrote; the movement was an explosion of ideas, one tumbling into the next. It elicited howls of approval from the audience.
They proceeded back into modern composers with two movements from Plan and Elevation, a quartet by composer Caroline Shaw, “a North Carolina native,” Finck said. That piece balanced sweeping chords from some instruments with still, austere notes from others, building and fading in intensity, then moving into a plucked section that proceeded from bell-like phrases to something more like frantic raindrops. It then developed into an aching chorale that gathered impossible momentum, only to stop on a dime and end in a whisper. Any noise the audience made during previous pieces stopped for this one. In that time, the Cave was transformed into something much more intimate and intense than a concert hall could be.
The quartet then turned to a piece by another North Carolina composer, Tui St. George Tucker, who lived in Boone, where Finck had grown up. The piece was an exercise in textures and angular rhythms, letting the players showcase where they excelled as a group. They used some of the rougher edges of their tones to bring out the energy in the piece, letting the phrases breathe in complete unison. The piercing austerity of some of the passages let the dense harmonies have their own vibrations, clear and sharp.
As the quartet settled into a final piece — another by Finck called “Quilting Song,” which also involved singing passages — the audience was as rapt as ever, but now the sounds of life in other parts joined the music. Glasses clinked. Ice rattled. A little chitchat resumed in the back. It was as it should have been. As the piece took off in a flutter of harmonics, it became a part of everyday life, and suffused everyday life with emotion, perhaps emotion that had been there all along and just needed to be uncovered.
After a short break the Wilmington, N.C.-based band Tercel took the stage, interspersing amiable banter with heartfelt anthems that grew more epic as the set progressed. Their songs fit into the mold of melodic indie rock with more than a few rhythmic tricks up its sleeve. Anchored by hard-driving bass and drums, guitars and pedal steel swapped between big hooks and gritty textures, while the vocals soared over it all.
Next, the Carrboro, N.C.-based Spare used big riffs and full-throated vocals to make a power trio onslaught, with songs that swung between a quiet churn and an all-out wail.
Blood Red River, from Durham, N.C., describes itself as “an action/adventure band that has been making you dance and helping you get laid since 2005.” The quartet of players in the club made good on at least the first half of that promise with fun, infectious surf rock. Bodies moved. A glass or two was broken thanks to some light moshing. And the night continued.
