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ASQ’s April in New York
Tuesday April 24, 2017 7:30 pm Anne Ratner Concert Series New York, New York Tel: (518) 329-7924 Web: www.anneratnerconcertseries.org Program: TBA Wednesday April 25, 2018 7:30 pm Baruch Performing Arts Center Baruch College, City University of New York Engelman Recital Hall New York, New York Tel: (646) 312-5073 Web: baruch.cuny.edu/bpac Program: Robert Schumann Quartet in A Minor,…
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Haydn: The Seven Last Words of Christ
Eric Bromberger offers the following background on The Alexander String Quartet’s March 30, 2018 performance of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco: Haydn may have claimed that his thirty years as kapellmeister to the Esterhazy princes forced him to work in isolation, but from…
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Alan Jones: The Readings for Haydn’s Seven Last Words
The Alexander String Quartet’s March 30, 2018 performance of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco will feature readings between the movements from Dean Emeritus, Alan Jones. Dean Emeritus Jones offers his notes for these readings below: The readings between the movements are meant to…
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Sunday LIEDER ALIVE!
Sunday, June 11 will mark the world premiere performance of our own Zak Grafilo’s Mahler Lieder eines Fahrenden gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) transcription for string quartet and mezzo-soprano (Kindra Scharich). The event will be presented by LIEDER ALIVE! and will also mark the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to support the recording of three…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Opus 110
In the summer of 1960 Shostakovich went to Dresden, where he was to write a score for the film Five Days, Five Nights, a joint East German and Soviet production. The devastation of Dresden by Allied bombing in 1945—the event that drove Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse Five—was still evident in 1960, and it stunned…
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William Walton String Quartet No. 2
Walton spent World War II writing film scores, including the music to Henry V (he had originally wanted to serve as an ambulance driver, but after he landed several ambulances in the ditch, the government decided that he would be more useful as a composer). In the summer of 1945, months after the end of…
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Bartók String Quartet No. 6
One of the paramount qualities of the Bartók quartets as a series is that—like Beethoven’s—they exemplify growth. The problems and possibilities of string quartet writing are not of the kind that imply a single solution, no matter how perfect, nor a single form, no matter how refined. With the composition of the Sixth Quartet, then,…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 6 in G Major, Opus 101
Shostakovich’s sudden re-marriage in the summer of 1956 caught even his closest friends by surprise. His first wife, the physicist Nina Varzar, had died suddenly in December 1954, and eighteen months later the shy composer impulsively proposed to a pretty young party official, Margarita Kainova. She just as impulsively accepted, and they were married in…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 5 in B-flat Major, Opus 92
Shostakovich wrote his Fifth String Quartet in the fall of 1952, but it remained in manuscript, unperformed, for over a year—and for very good reasons. Not only were these some of the darkest years of the Cold War, they were also the paranoid final years of Stalin’s repressive regime. Four years earlier, at the 1948…
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Looking ahead to March 2017
The Alexander String Quartet is looking ahead to a busy March schedule filled with exciting performances from coast-to-coast! Saturday March 4, 2017 10:00 am Shostakovich String Quartet Cycle San Francisco Performances Inc. Herbst Theatre San Francisco, CaliforniaTel: (415) 398-6449 Web: performances.org Program: ASQ with lecturer, Robert Greenberg Shostakovich Quartet No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op.…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 4 in D Major, Opus 83
The Soviet crackdown on composers in February 1948 remains, over half a century later, one of the most devastating examples of government interference and censorship in history. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky, and others were excoriated for their “formalistic distortions and anti-democratic tendencies” and for writing “confused, neuropathological combinations which transform music into cacophony.” These composers…
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Shostakovich Quartet No. 3 in F Major, Opus 73
The Third String Quartet was Shostakovich’s only composition during the year 1946. He dedicated it to the members of the Beethoven Quartet, who gave the first performance in Moscow on their namesake’s 176th birthday, December 16, 1946. The mention of Beethoven is apt, for many observers have felt that this quartet, particularly in its heartfelt…
