Getting Sirius at The Latchis

DATING, AS IT DOES, FROM 1938, Brattleboro’s Latchis Hotel is the kind of small-city gem that was built to welcome big-city escapees seeking a rural(ish) retreat without sacrificing the luxuries to which they were accustomed. The luxuries are still here, even if the guests now arrive by car instead of train. And the hotel is also host to three theaters that offer first-run and specialty films as well as live performances.

The hotel’s International Music Series presented the Sirius String Quartet in its Main Theater tonight, an ensemble that has been around since 1994 and quickly evolved a personality that bypasses the mainstream quartet repertory in favor of personal expressions and explorations. “We write and arrange our own music” cellist Jeremy Harman explained as the quartet took us through a program much of which is featured on their new CD (and streaming collection) “Incantations,” which I’ll get back to in a few paragraphs.

My wife insists that she found a soothing aspect to the concert, but she’s much better than I am at taking music at face value. I’m busily trying to untangle structure and harmony as I seek to contextualize what I’m hearing in a framework in which the music of this ensemble will never fit. They’ve collected elements from free jazz and Eastern Europe and vintage pop and more and synthesized them into sounds that test the limits of their instruments.

Harman’s “Echo Chambers,” which opened the program, began with slow repeated figures that the instruments took up singly and carried into combinations before surging into what sounded like a variation, up-tempo, propelled by tricky rhythms. This also was the first example (of many to come) of skilled improvisation, here performed by first violinist Fung Chern Hwei.

Underscoring the variety of influence, the next piece, violist Sunjay Jayaram’s “Sahasranamam,” was based (he explained) on a Hindu chant. It started with a slow drone-like intro that soon gave way to its own compelling up-tempo sequence.

This was a pattern informing many of the evening’s pieces. Much as a jazz concert takes on a consistent form of ensemble, solos, trading fragments, and a rideout, here the pattern was to start slow, explore the appropriate harmony and instrumental textures, then let loose into something faster and more improvisational.

Songs that followed included violinist Gregor Huebner’s “Chant pour l'ile Gorée,” commemorating some months he spent in Senegal; “At Sea (Scatter the Ashes)” by Harman; Hwei’s “Farewell, Horatio”; Jayaram’s “You Can't Get Them Back,” and “Paths Become Lines” by Harman. As you might guess, many of these were written to commemorate the death of a loved one.

The quartet’s latest album, “Incantations,” is described as “honoring memory, grief, and the aspect of loss as it appears in our interpersonal and social relationships,” going on to hope that the collection of nine original numbers can act as “a speaking vessel to concentrate the profound loss experienced at the individual and communal level in recent decades into a great beyond...” With several of the album’s numbers comprising most of the concert program, the cumulative effect of grief was powerful. Numbing. There’s no question that grief has inspired some of the greatest classical pieces, like Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio and Berg’s Violin Concerto and just about everything by Shostakovich.

But I wouldn’t mind if one of the quartet members would also write a piece titled something like “I Had a Really Happy Day Today” to add a little spark of joy to the proceedings, but I’m bowing to the wisdom of this talented quartet to assemble a meaningful setlist. And they did offer as an encore Huebner’s funky arrangement of “Eleanor Rigby,” which hit me and the rest of the audience in just the right place.

The four members bring an incredible diversity of background to the group, which must help in keeping the music they create so vibrant. Violinist Fung Chern Hwei, a native of Malaysia, credits his youthful interest in Chinese popular and classical music, Indian Bollywood tunes, Malay dance music, and western classical music with sparking an uncategorizable pursuit of original sounds, while fellow-violinist Gregor Huebner spent pre-Sirius time working with jazz pianist Richie Beirach (resulting in the albums “Round about Bartók” and “Round about Federico Mompou”), making it unsurprising that he contributes some of the jazziest sounds to the groups improvisations.

Violist Sunjay Jayaram, the quartet’s newest member, moved to NYC from South Carolina to pursue a degree in violin performance, and has gone on to perform with such groups as the American Composers Orchestra, 8-Bit Big Band, Westside Chamber Players and P’an, a traditional music collective.

The only member not living in New York City is Massachusetts-based cellist Jeremy Harman, whose CD shelf includes contemporary classical, modern jazz, folk, metal/hardcore, post-rock, downtempo electronic, and free improvisation. He also appears frequently with instrumental chamber music/indie-rock alchemists Cordis,and has shared the stage with artists as diverse as Quincy Jones, Pinchas Zuckerman, Tony Bennett, and Peter Gabriel.

Which only goes to show that you need to listen to as diverse a range of music as you can find. Professional musicians draw no distinctions among the various genres; professional listeners should share that curiosity. It adds greatly to the enjoyment of an off-the-beaten-path group like the Sirius Quartet.

I can see this group at home in a sassy jazz club or an alt-rock bar – but the Latchis is just as quirky, with its mixture of Art Deco appointments and a theater sporting Greek Revival columns. Better still, behind the quartet were video projections that seemed to tie in with the music, which turned out to be exactly the intention. Designed and DJ’d by multi-instrumentalist and audio engineer Peter Wilson, the images were as hypnotic as the music, sometimes a blossoming series of geometric figures, sometimes something resembling the Stargate sequence from “2001.” It all worked together splendidly well.