It’s often useful to prepare for a concert by checking out past recordings by a composer or ensemble. But it can also be fun to attend a show blind, with no informational baggage.
On Tuesday, I took the unprepared route to a concert by the Bozzini Quartet, the first installment of this year’s Time Spans festival, which runs through Saturday at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan. I came out of the show a proselytizing convert to the music of Linda Catlin Smith.
Her string quartet Folkestone (1999) quickly revealed points of affinity with other music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries — including the patient thematic unfolding of Morton Feldman, as well as the quiet dynamics familiar to composers of the Wandelweiser collective.
Yet almost as quickly, Folkestone made me forget those sonic signposts; my focus shifted to the polished clarity of Ms. Smith’s compositional intentions. Inspired by a book of watercolors, Folkestone has 24 “panels.” Each seemed finely wrought, such as an early one in which a short stretch of canonic layering suavely morphed into a Minimalist pulse before dissolving into a series of strangely harmonized sighs.
The work never rose above a generally hushed volume, but its contrasts rang with real force. (It stuck in the memory, too, and compelled me to purchase two of Ms. Smith’s impressive recent albums — Drifter and Wanderer — from the imprint Another Timbre.) The Bozzini Quartet played this delicately intense music with subtle aggression, an approach that worked equally well for Cassandra Miller’s About Bach, a work that hitches its references to Bach’s great Chaconne to some high-pitched violin parts that sounded as though sung through clenched teeth.