The Knights: A Second of Silence (SACD review)

Music of Schubert, Glass, Feldman, and Satie. Erik Jacobsen, The Knights. Ancalagon ANC 137.

"That kind of hovering, as if you're in a register you've never heard." --Morton Feldman

If you can't quite place who The Knights are, you may remember them from their award-winning 2010 album of Mozart violin concertos with Scott and Lara St. John (http://classicalcandor.blogspot.com/2010/08/mozart-sinfonia-concertante-sacd-review.html). They are a small chamber ensemble of about three dozen players, led by co-Artistic Directors Colin and Eric Jacobsen and conducted by Eric Jacobsen. They're a lively group of musicians, and on the present album they offer a unique point of view.

A Second of Silence is a theme album from The Knights. The idea is to present music that evokes to some degree the "kind of hovering" mentioned by composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) above, the kind of tranquility offered not just by the notes of the music but by the silences, the quiet moments, between the notes and at the end of a piece. And The Knights juxtapose their choices of material from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries just to prove their point.

They begin with Gymnopedie No. 1 by Erik Satie (1866-1937), a French Impressionist ahead of his time whose music predated minimalism and other such movements. In his Gymnopedies he created quiet little works that demonstrate the album's point. The booklet note suggests they are examples of tranquillity drifting toward stillness. Fair enough, and The Knights perform them accordingly.

Next is Company, a four-movement work by American composer Philip Glass (b. 1937) originally written for string quartet and here arranged for chamber orchestra. The point is to compare and contrast Glass's twentieth-century minimalism with the earlier nineteenth-century Classical-Romanticism of Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) in several pieces that follow it: Gretchen am Spinnrade, Symphonies Nos. 3 and 8, and Des Baches Wiegenlied ("The Brook's Lullaby"). There are some striking similarities.

But the real question is whether any of this familiar music is any better executed by Erik Jacobsen and The Knights than on many other recordings of it. The answer rests on the high quality of the performances, which are flexible, precise, virtuosic, and refined, Jacobsen leading the group with a deft hand. So, yes, The Knights perform the music quite well, the orchestral sounds floating lightly around us, with the sudden bursts of enthusiasm the composers intended made the more startling and expressive for the clarity and accuracy of the ensemble's playing. The Knights emphasize not only the music's brief silences but the dynamics and phrasing in them as well. To my ears, The Knights sound most closely like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and that's about the highest compliment I can offer them.

The performance of Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony, for instance, is as ethereal as I've ever heard it and No. 3 as sprightly, energetic, and furiously lilting as you'll find, so beyond any significance the group is trying to impress upon us in the album, their renditions of the music are among the best available.

Interrupting the two Schubert symphonies is Satie's Gymnopedie No. 2, another magical little pause unto itself. And following that is a further tiny piece, this one by Morton Feldman called Madam Press Died Last Night at Ninety. It's in the same minimalist-modern vein as the earlier Glass piece, if quieter.

There is no doubt Jacobsen and The Knights perform all of the music on the disc in high fashion, and whether you appreciate the disc's thematic ideas or not, the interpretations and playing are first rate and probably warrant a listen.

Engineer Jeremy Tusz of Diapason recorded, edited, and mixed the disc for Ancalagon at the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Concert Hall, Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, Flushing, New York from June 23-25, 2010. Made in both two-channel stereo (to which I listened on a Sony SACD player) and multichannel surround and presented on a hybrid, dual-format SACD, the sound is clear and dynamic yet warm and smooth, too.

The sonics are wonderfully immersive, with great washes of sound caressing the ear in a most-welcome and realistic manner. Even without rear speakers, one can feel a splendidly ambient surround effect. The overall aural picture is a tad soft, while having excellent transient response and tautness, making for a most natural and enjoyable listening experience.

One minor criticism, though: Because The Knights are not (yet) a household name and because the album title goes nowhere in telling potential buyers what it's all about, I suspect the producers may have shortchanged themselves. I mean, Is this Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" here? Who would know that it contains primarily Schubert and others or that The Knights are a chamber ensemble? And the bizarrely surreal cover picture doesn't help. But what do I know? It'll probably sell a million copies.

JJP

Meet the Staff

Meet the Staff
John J. Puccio, Founder and Contributor

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on the Big Jon and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing for the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

Karl Nehring, Editor and Contributor

For more than 20 years I was the editor of The $ensible Sound magazine and a regular contributor to both its equipment and recordings review pages. I would not presume to present myself as some sort of expert on music, but I have a deep love for and appreciation of many types of music, "classical" especially, and have listened to thousands of recordings over the years, many of which still line the walls of my listening room (and occasionally spill onto the furniture and floor, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife). I have always taken the approach as a reviewer that what I am trying to do is simply to point out to readers that I have come across a recording that I have found of interest, a recording that I think they might appreciate my having pointed out to them. I suppose that sounds a bit simple-minded, but I know I appreciate reading reviews by others that do the same for me — point out recordings that they think I might enjoy.

For readers who might be wondering about what kind of system I am using to do my listening, I should probably point out that I do a LOT of music listening and employ a variety of means to do so in a variety of environments, as I would imagine many music lovers also do. Starting at the more grandiose end of the scale, the system in which I do my most serious listening comprises Marantz CD 6007 and Onkyo CD 7030 CD players, NAD C 658 streaming preamp/DAC, Legacy Audio PowerBloc2 amplifier, and a pair of Legacy Audio Focus SE loudspeakers. I occasionally do some listening through pair of Sennheiser 560S headphones. I miss the excellent ELS Studio sound system in our 2016 Acura RDX (now my wife's daily driver) on which I had ripped more than a hundred favorite CDs to the hard drive, so now when driving my 2022 Accord EX-L Hybrid I stream music from my phone through its adequate but not outstanding factory system. For more casual listening at home when I am not in my listening room, I often stream music through the phone into a Vizio soundbar system that has tolerably nice sound for such a diminutive physical presence. And finally, at the least grandiose end of the scale, I have an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom II Bluetooth speaker for those occasions where I am somewhere by myself without a sound system but in desperate need of a musical fix. I just can’t imagine life without music and I am humbly grateful for the technology that enables us to enjoy it in so many wonderful ways.

William (Bill) Heck, Webmaster and Contributor

Among my early childhood memories are those of listening to my mother playing records (some even 78 rpm ones!) of both classical music and jazz tunes. I suppose that her love of music was transmitted genetically, and my interest was sustained by years of playing in rock bands – until I realized that this was no way to make a living. The interest in classical music was rekindled in grad school when the university FM station serving as background music for studying happened to play the Brahms First Symphony. As the work came to an end, it struck me forcibly that this was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and from that point on, I never looked back. This revelation was to the detriment of my studies, as I subsequently spent way too much time simply listening, but music has remained a significant part of my life. These days, although I still can tell a trumpet from a bassoon and a quarter note from a treble clef, I have to admit that I remain a nonexpert. But I do love music in general and classical music in particular, and I enjoy sharing both information and opinions about it.

The audiophile bug bit about the same time that I returned to classical music. I’ve gone through plenty of equipment, brands from Audio Research to Yamaha, and the best of it has opened new audio insights. Along the way, I reviewed components, and occasionally recordings, for The $ensible Sound magazine. Most recently I’ve moved to my “ultimate system” consisting of a BlueSound Node streamer, an ancient Toshiba multi-format disk player serving as a CD transport, Legacy Wavelet II DAC/preamp/crossover, dual Legacy PowerBloc2 amps, and Legacy Signature SE speakers (biamped), all connected with decently made, no-frills cables. With the arrival of CD and higher resolution streaming, that is now the source for most of my listening.

Ryan Ross, Contributor

I started listening to and studying classical music in earnest nearly three decades ago. This interest grew naturally out of my training as a pianist. I am now a musicologist by profession, specializing in British and other symphonic music of the 19th and 20th centuries. My scholarly work has been published in major music journals, as well as in other outlets. Current research focuses include twentieth-century symphonic historiography, and the music of Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Malcolm Arnold.

I am honored to contribute writings to Classical Candor. In an age where the classical recording industry is being subjected to such profound pressures and changes, it is more important than ever for those of us steeped in this cultural tradition to continue to foster its love and exposure. I hope that my readers can find value, no matter how modest, in what I offer here.


Bryan Geyer, Technical Analyst

I initially embraced classical music in 1954 when I mistuned my car radio and heard the Heifetz recording of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. That inspired me to board the new "hi-fi" DIY bandwagon. In 1957 I joined one of the pioneer semiconductor makers and spent the next 32 years marketing transistors and microcircuits to military contractors. Home audio DIY projects remained a personal passion until 1989 when we created our own new photography equipment company. I later (2012) revived my interest in two channel audio when we "downsized" our life and determined that mini-monitors + paired subwoofers were a great way to mate fine music with the space constraints of condo living.

Visitors that view my technical papers on this site may wonder why they appear here, rather than on a site that features audio equipment reviews. My reason is that I tried the latter, and prefer to publish for people who actually want to listen to music; not to equipment. My focus is in describing what's technically beneficial to assure that the sound of the system will accurately replicate the source input signal (i. e. exhibit high accuracy) without inordinate cost and complexity. Conversely, most of the audiophiles of today strive to achieve sound that's euphonic, i.e. be personally satisfying. In essence, audiophiles seek sound that's consistent with their desire; the music is simply a test signal.

Mission Statement

It is the goal of Classical Candor to promote the enjoyment of classical music. Other forms of music come and go--minuets, waltzes, ragtime, blues, jazz, bebop, country-western, rock-'n'-roll, heavy metal, rap, and the rest--but classical music has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. It's no accident that every major city in the world has one or more symphony orchestras.

When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

So, if Classical Candor can expand one's awareness of classical music and bring more joy to one's life, more power to it. It's done its job. --John J. Puccio

Contact Information

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"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa

"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa