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The Junction Trio Brings a Little Unruliness Back to Carnegie Hall


Performing Ives and Zorn alongside Beethoven, three stupendous players glory in skirting the edge of artistic instability.

Violinist Stefan Jackiw has performed all of Ives’s violin sonatas with Jeremy Denk, cellist Jay Campbell is also a member of the tirelessly self-challenging JACK Quartet, and pianist (and composer) Conrad Tao has fashioned an elegantly idiosyncratic career. Campbell has a close relationship with Zorn, who works like a kind of compositional collagist, slicing whatever music crosses his path into strips, then gluing them together into sequences that are both familiar and jubilantly disjunct. There’s nothing contemplative about Philosophical Investigations, or rather it emulates the experience of watching the city swarm from a bench on a Broadway median: anger bumping into laughter, languages briefly intertwining, a hectic sequence of sprints, strides, and close encounters.

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