Also this issue:

Flash Forward
Costumed lip-synchers Fischerspooner are not out to shock you.
-Sean O’Neal

Dirty Three
-Paul Burress

Jayhawks
-Sam Adams

Gabriel Yacoub
-Mary Armstrong

VERSIONsound
-Sean O’Neal

Vir Unis/James Johnson
-A.D. Amorosi

The Funk Brothers
-Nicole Pensiero

CD Reviews
-Sam Adams, A.D. Amorosi and Collin Keefe

April 10-16, 2003

musicpicks

Brentano String Quartet

Bach ranks very near the top of the heap of humankind’s creative geniuses, and yet, despite a hubris well described by his contemporaries, he seemed oblivious to his own posterity. Huge chunks of his music are lost forever, while scholars still scour old German coffeehouses for yet another scrap of his divine output. But he was determined to lay down his art for the history books for at least one work, "The Art of the Fugue," his treatise on an art form that was already fading in the great man’s final years. The haunting motif from the incomplete "The Art of the Fugue," based on the letters of the composer’s name, has inspired musicians since it was first heard. More than two centuries later, the Brentano String Quartet will play the music of 10 of the leading composers of our time as they pay tribute to the timeless wisdom of Bach in a set of musical responses to different sections of the original work. It is a multicultural group, including Sofia Gubaidulina from Russia, the American serialist master Charles Wuorinen, Chinese-American school doyen Chou Wen-chung, Pulitzer Prize-winning Israeli native Shulamit Ran and jazz superstar Wynton Marsalis. The conceit is to bridge the ages with the musical art. It is a solace deeply desired in these confusing, turbulent times. If Bach can’t help us now, no one can.

Fri., April 11, 8 p.m., $20, Pennsylvania Convention Center Auditorium, 13th and Arch sts., 215-569-8080.

—Peter Burwasser