"Amid the unfolding drama, one of the world's most well-worn classical works was twisted into something strangely fresh, resulting in not so much a deconstruction of Mozart's work as a reformation of it, with each component treated like a separate piece in a bold new puzzle. At one point, the sonata started to sound like something by Bartok, said Stephen Prina, the musician-slash-artist who created this wild riff on the master."
"At another, it started to sound like Shostakovich! It just kept changing. The result, says Prina, plays with the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar. What do you have to do to something that's familiar to render it so unfamiliar that you can exact a different relationship with it? How do you take works that are on a pedestal and listen to them again instead of simply revering them?"
At the Museum of Modern Art a sextet performed the first movement of Mozart's String Quartet No. 15 in D minor before the conductor began rolling a six-sided die to select players to restart their parts. Selected musicians repeatedly returned to their openings while others continued, producing overlapping restarts that reshaped the quartet over 25 minutes. The interventions transformed the piece from a conventional performance into a reformed puzzle-like work that shifted stylistically, recalling Bartók and Shostakovich at moments. The project interrogates how deliberate alterations of familiar material can produce unfamiliar relationships, and the artist has pursued such questions across multiple artistic forms for five decades.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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