Review: Third Face

One of the most ambitious programs of the season was that heard at a Group for Contemporary Music concert last week. It consisted of four very demanding- and rewarding- string quartets by Jonathon Harvey, Wayne Peterson, David Felder, and Stefan Wolpe [...] The four works were very different from one another; in idiom, technically, emotionally, in musical purpose. But in common they demonstrated the continuing vitality of the medium to which for more than two centuries composers have entrusted some of their highest, strangest, noblest thoughts [...] Peterson and Felder are American composers unknown to American Grove Dictionary, but not to American audiences; and Felder and Cage were the American composers honored at last year's Huddersfield Festival [...] Felder's Third Face was given its first performance by the Arditti, at the 1988 Buffalo new music festival. I was struck by it then; after further hearings of it I admire it even more. It is lucid, but with a controlled wildness in its making. Written for virtuosi, it challenges them by presenting its fierce, fertile ideas with almost reckless rhythmic and dynamic exuberance.