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Stories   >   Mark O'Connor's 'Beethoven and Bluegrass' at Carnegie Hall sounds gimmicky. Rest assured it was not / blogcritics

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Mark O'Connor's 'Beethoven and Bluegrass' at Carnegie Hall sounds gimmicky. Rest assured it was not / blogcritics

Posted: April 27, 2025

“Beethoven and Bluegrass.” If it sounds gimmicky, rest assured it was not. On April 25 Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall hosted composer and bluegrass virtuoso Mark O’Connor, his wife, fiddler and vocalist Maggie O’Connor, and the Vega Quartet, performing music by Beethoven and by Mark O’Connor along with a few cover songs. Mr. O’Connor’s instrumental skills are profound, but it was the depth of his compositions as much as the quality of the performances on stage that made the juxtaposition of styles and centuries work smoothly and create a joyful concert experience.

Mark O’Connor has been working for years to bring bluegrass music into the classical chamber music realm. The program concluded with the lilting “Appalachian Waltz,” which he wrote years ago for Yo-Yo Ma, who still performs it. But the central and much deeper exploration of bluegrass as transformed for chamber ensemble was a pair of movements from his String Quartet No. 2, “Bluegrass.”

The Vega Quartet performed the second and third movements. The former is a tour de force of time-tested bluegrass musicality refashioned with modernist rhythmic irregularity that takes tradition to another dimension. It calls for ferocious fiddling requiring both technical mastery and a feel for the grooves of acoustic country fiddle music. Violinists Emily Daggett Smith and Jessica Shuang Wu proved fully up to the task. Viola and cello also shoulder some of the weight, and (respectively) Joseph Skerik and Guang Wang dove just as convincingly into the spirit.

Themes leap from instrument to instrument. Resounding unison phrases break the breathlessness. In one sequence the viola simulates the brittle twang of a banjo, one of several elements that made audience members laugh in delight. Altogether, the cleverness of the construction, the infernally complex part-mapping, together with the needed virtuosity, must make it a challenge to perform. The Vega musicians, quartet-in-residence at Emory University, played it as if born to it.

The third movement must feel like a relief. It’s a country waltz, partly (as I heard it) in the form of a theme and variations and partly in sonata form. As melody is traded among the musicians, O’Connor brilliantly stretches and deepens and develops bluegrass tropes into thoughtful concert themes. The ongoing development then lifts the harmonic language out of country modes and into the more complex modernist harmonies we heard in the previous movement.

Good bluegrass performance requires serious musicianship, but other than that, it’s fun and not seriousness that we most commonly associate with the genre. But O’Connor’s string quartet carried quite an intensity to go with its fun. So it was not at all incongruous that it followed Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 95, “Serioso.”

The Vega Quartet gave this last of Beethoven’s Middle Quartets a sinewy and exciting reading. It was so experimental for its time, and for Beethoven himself, that he directed that it should never be performed in public, but only for a few aficionados. Still, it contains the full measure of his achievement and his genius up to that time; it’s essential Beethoven. This performance captured it all: the lockstep scales, the lullaby, the touch of fugue, the spaciousness, the “gypsy”-flavored section, the romance and passion, the aggression. I’m always divining new things every time I hear a Beethoven string quartet. This rendition was no exception.

There may not be a specific Beethoven influence on O’Connor’s string quartet, other than what every composer since Beethoven must reckon with. But the composers did seem to be speaking to each other in a way, through the interpretations of these four fine musicians.
After the intermission we experienced the performing skills of the O’Connors themselves. A long, original fiddle-shredding solo tune from Mark had an improvisatory feel and a tapestry-like structure. The numbers that followed from the two O’Connors ranged from traditional reels to a beautiful Dolly Parton song (“Wildflowers”) from that gorgeous collaborative album from years ago by Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt, with divine vocals from Maggie O’Connor. Mark demonstrated his guitar and mandolin chops too, in one number evoking a style reminiscent of Jorma Kaukonen.

This half of the concert was an absolute pleasure, ending with the Vega Quartet joining the O’Connors for the (to me) rather sappy “Appalachian Waltz.” But hey, with all his technical brilliance, Yo-Yo Ma has never shied away from sentimentality.

So: Beethoven and bluegrass? Bring it on. If this show comes to your town, go experience it. (The Vega Quartet would be well worth hearing on their own too.) The upshot: mixing up genres and traditions can be an exercise in rich creative fertility. And I think Beethoven would have dug it.

Photo credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien

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