COLLECTIVE WISDOM | THE ARTS FUSE - REVIEW

December Short Fuses — Materia Critica

by: Jonathan Blumhofer | December, 2023

What better way to celebrate a major turnover in membership and to remind all and sundry that Sybarite5 retains its familiar freshness, daring, and brio than for the group to bring out a new recording?

That’s just what Collective Wisdom, the string quintet’s first album (Bright Shiny Things) in five years – and first since the arrival of violinist Suliman Tekalli, violist Caeli Smith, and cellist Laura Andrade — does. A mix of arrangements, improvisations, and new commissions, the disc is as unpredictable as it is refreshing: an invigorating blend of diverse repertoire, top-notch musicianship, virtuosity, and surprisingly reflective turns.

The last emerge most strikingly in a trio of works by the turn-of-the-20th-century Armenian composer/musicologist/priest Komitas. True, two of the selections — The Red Shawl and Oh Nazan — dance gamely (the latter sounds like something Dvorak might have written).

But even in those, the hypnotic melancholy that haunts the central Spring isn’t more than a single harmonic turn away. A similar delicacy marks Pedro Giraudo’s enchantingly Golijov-esque (or is it Piazzolla-like?) Con un Nodo en La Garganta and Jessica Meyer’s attractive Slow Burn.

More extroverted are Curtis and Elektra Stewart’s Manga and the opening track, Paul Sanho Kim’s arrangement of the Punch Brothers’ Movement and Location. The last — all vigor, energy, and soaring melodicism — provides the album its fantastic opening hook.

Somewhat less compelling are Jackson Greenberg’s Apartments, with its intrusive electronic element and meandering string writing, and Michael Gilbertson’s ironic Collective Wisdom. But even these have their moments — and, besides, Sybarite5 plays everything with such clarity and precision that repeated listening is all but foreordained.