#4746, Slow Beethoven, With Jeffrey Zeigler
The versatile and adventurous cellist, collaborator, and improviser Jeffrey Zeigler (who played with Kronos Quartet for eight seasons), talks us through Slow Beethoven, a collaboration between The TANK and a string quartet led by Zeigler, with violist Milan Milisavljevic and violinists Miranda Cuckson and Lara St. John, in which they play the the fugue movement from Beethoven’s “String Quartet #14 in C-sharp minor,” Opus 131, but slowed down to glacial.
The idea was always for extreme slowness, with the intent to harness the sonic properties of The TANK Center for Sonic Arts —a nonprofit recording studio and concert venue centered around an extremely resonant empty water tank in the high desert of northwestern Colorado, known for its otherworldly acoustics, and its almost 40 seconds of sustained reverb. During the recording at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, the sounds of their performance were relayed to The TANK in Colorado and back into the headphones of the performers to allow each of the lush, Ludwiggy chords to ring out and fade within the extremely resonant confines of The TANK. The quartet had to adjust and slow their performance drastically so that the movement, which is usually around seven minutes in length, stretched out to a 44-minute epic. Listen to some of the time-expanding, intense feelings which may not be limited to meditation on grief, resolution, and existence itself, (Round Sound Bandcamp). - Caryn Havlik
Program #4746, Slow Beethoven, with Jeffrey Ziegler (First aired 5/2/23)
ARTIST: Emerson String Quartet
WORK: Beethoven: String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131 [1:00]
RECORDING: Beethoven: The String Quartets
SOURCE: Deutsche Grammophon
INFO: deutschegrammophon.com
ARTISTS: Lara St. John \ Violin 1; Miranda Cuckson \ Violin 2; Milan Milisavljevic \ Viola; Jeffrey Zeigler \ Cello
WORK: Beethoven: String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131 [10:32]
RECORDING: Slow Beethoven
SOURCE: Round Sound
INFO: https://roundsound.tanksounds.org/album/slow-beethoven | tanksounds.org
ARTISTS: Lara St. John \ Violin 1; Miranda Cuckson \ Violin 2; Milan Milisavljevic \ Viola; Jeffrey Zeigler \ Cello
WORK: Beethoven: String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131 [13:06]
RECORDING: Slow Beethoven
SOURCE: Round Sound
INFO: https://roundsound.tanksounds.org/album/slow-beethoven | tanksounds.org
ARTISTS: Lara St. John \ Violin 1; Miranda Cuckson \ Violin 2; Milan Milisavljevic \ Viola; Jeffrey Zeigler \ Cello
WORK: Beethoven: String Quartet No. 14, Op. 131 [18:28]
RECORDING: Slow Beethoven
SOURCE: Round Sound
INFO: https://roundsound.tanksounds.org/album/slow-beethoven | tanksounds.org
