by Melanie Wong

It was a tight squeeze in the 70-seat black-box known as the Interart Theatre Annex, where Ensemble 54 performed a film- and theater-inspired program earlier this week as part of Blessed Unrest's Music Mélange series. The five-year-old quartet consists of clarinetists Nuno Antunes, Pascal Archer, David Gould, and Nicholas Gallas (new to the ensemble this year)—who, ensemble-wise, proved to be a solid match in sound and personality, taking a fresh and creative approach to a clarinet-quartet recital.

Between the more traditional pieces on the program—Peter Schubert's flashy operatic arrangement of The Barber of Seville, Alfred Uhl's quirky Divertimento, and James Rae's arrangement of music from The Threepenny Opera—laid the premiere of Hayes Greenfield's Rothko's Chapel. Greenfield's music tonally captured the sublime color palette, and effectively reproduced the slow and subtle atmospheric changes that one would experience while viewing Rothko's paintings in the chapel. The ensemble members imperceptibly faded in and out to create lingering chords that changed ever so slightly over time. Unfortunately, the movie that accompanied the work underwhelmed; the contrast quality was poor, so for anyone who had never seen a Rothko in person, the meaning and concept was totally lost.

What began traditionally enough took a turn after intermission, when the foursome mimed their way, Chaplin-style, to their seats in bow ties and derbies. This behavior set the tone for what would come next: their own arrangement of Chaplin's Without You, which led directly into his film The Cure, for which the quartet provided a semi-improvised synchronized soundtrack.