Six-Hour Performance of The Flux Quartet, with Cellist Darrett Adkins '91, Reviewed in The New Yorker
			The Flux Quartet, featuring cellist Darrett Adkins '91, was reviewed in the November 1 New Yorker. Alex Ross, noted music critic, reviewed a performance of the quartet's six-hour performance of Morton Feldman's "String Quartet II" in the Great Hall at Cooper Union. Ross wrote: "The Flux players - Tom Chiu, Cornelius Dufallo, Kenji Bunch, and Darrett Adkins - coped staggeringly well with the physical challenges of this piece. They never left their seats, they never faltered in their execution of the score, and they produced good, true tone all the way through. It was a feat worthy of the 'Guinness Book of Records,' and they didn't look particularly tired when it was over. "Yet 'Quartet II' proved to be much more than a display of avant-garde machismo. It was a disorienting, trans-fixing experience that repeatedly approached the sublime…" Ross ended the review by writing: " At the end, the music becomes harsh again. The cello closes with a high two-note figure that sounds like the distant wail of an ambulance. The Flux Quartet added, to chilling effect, a long ritardando. The audience sat for a minute in deathly silence before releasing itself from captivity with riotous applause. It would be crazy, of course, if all music worked this way; the pragmatic magic of a William Bolcom is a necessary counterweight. But Feldman hit his mark. His works belong among the grandest, strangest monuments that a millennium of music has produced." The performance was previewed in an October 8 arts feature in The New York Times. Entitled "Required for a Musical Marathon: Plenty of Sleep and Willpower," Anthony Tommasini wrote "A string quartet six hours long? It's no gimmick to four champions of new music." Last February, the Flux Quartet was featured in a front page Living Arts section feature of The New York Times. Written by Anthony Tommasini, the piece was entitled "The New Faces of New Music: Hope and Dedication Propel the Flux Quartet."
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