Experiments in Living, a new double-album by the Spektral Quartet on New Focus Recordings (titled after George Lewis’ piece of the same name), features a re-release of The Real Book of Fake Tunes for flute and quartet, originally recorded by Spektral and Claire Chase on Cycles and Arrows (2018). The piece is newly mixed and mastered for the occasion, and sits alongside works by Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Sam Pluta, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis. Released on August 28, 2020.
https://spektralquartet.com/experiments-in-living
Selected Reviews
“The Spektral’s major project of the benighted year 2020, though, has been an album titled Experiments in Living, which is certain to appear on my year-end list of notable recordings. It is a tour-de-force survey of repertory, classic and modern, demonstrating in almost textbook fashion how nineteenth-century Romanticism evolved into twentieth-century modernism and then into the all-devouring experimentalism of recent decades… A delicate interplay of short motives in Cheung’s The Real Book of Fake Tunes, for flute and string quartet—Claire Chase joins the Spektral players on the recording—is akin to the contrapuntal games of the Schoenberg…The Spektral has accomplished the signal service of obliterating the dividing line between past and present, tradition and avant-garde; chronological barriers collapse, and the sounds roam free.”
Alex Ross, The New Yorker, November 2020
“Anthony Cheung’s exquisite The Real Book of Fake Tunes combines Claire Chase’s flute with filigree quartet writing to bewitching effect.”
David Kettle, The Strad, October 2020
Anthony Cheung’s The Real Book of Fake Tunes amounts to a textural tour-de-force, where flutist Claire Chase’s amazing command of extended techniques assiduously integrate within the composer’s boundless gestural arsenal. The fourth movement in particular stands out for Cheung’s blending of pizzicato punctuations and sustained chording, and for the climactic cascading runs with instruments in all registers.”
Jed Distler, Classics Today, August 2020