I reviewed Kernis’s First String Quartet six years ago (6/93) and noted then his fluent and easy access to different types of musical styles. Since then DSG has covered further releases on the enterprising Argo American Music series (11/96 and 10/97). Kernis, still under 40, has come a long way during the 1990s. His Second String Quartet won a Pulitzer Prize last year and he has become fashionable in a way which puts him ahead of his colleagues. He has said that he is not interested in originality, whatever that may now mean in the current pluralistic jungle, but the way in which a composer handles his style-modulations can often define his personality – look at examples from Ives to Ades.
I was not convinced by the bits-and-pieces finale of the First Quartet in 1993 and I have the same reaction now, in spite of these excellent performances. The Second Quartet starts in the energetic manner of Tippett but soon travels. The real discovery for me was the second movement. This is in memory of Bette Snapp, that great New York-based supporter of living composers. Anyone who knew her cannot fail to be impressed by this sincere tribute. The opening has a cello solo of numbed sadness which gives way to expressionist anger. Then comes the timeless ethereality of G major, the key of Ives’s Unanswered Question, and more protest. The movement seems too long – Kernis usually sprawls – but it catches the mood of the moment. The finale is a kind of mad tarantella as a reworking of Beethoven. We now have the chance of coming to Kernis on his own terms, in all these committed performances, although I prefer William Bolcom – in the same Argo series and far too soon deleted.'