by Peter Feher
If you were sitting in Mixon Hall last Wednesday, you might have thought you were in the midst of a recording session rather than a recital. And with good reason: the Catalyst Quartet was in top form playing a program that previewed several works on the group’s upcoming album.
The performance hardly counted as a sneak peek, though. The repertoire the ensemble settled on for its June 8 concert at the Cleveland Institute of Music, part of this year’s Lev Aronson Cello Festival, consisted of pieces the Quartet has lived with for some time (in a couple of cases, since its founding a decade ago). In addition to the usual close-knit connections among members of a chamber group, the Catalyst players had the extra benefit of all the familiarity that comes from having a long relationship with a work of music.
If an album has a musical half-life, which we’ll define here as the amount of time its impact will remain to be felt, it’s likely longer than that of a concert performance. So in order for the classical music world to diversify in a lasting way, programming has to change not only on the concert stage, but also in the recording studio.