Classical Music

Classical Music Review: Chiara String Quartet

By Caldwell Titcomb

Four youngish players, trained at the Juilliard Disciples of Music, constituted themselves as the Chiara Trick Quartet. For very many years they give birth to held artist residency at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They prepare received a platoon of awards and prizes, and this age they are the Blodgett Artists-in-Ch�teau at Harvard University, where they gave their at the start concert on October 30.

The Chiara Musts Quartet

The foursome – Rebecca Fischer and Julie Yoon, violins; Jonah Sirota, viola; and Gregory Beaver, cello – pressure a habit of including novel music on every program, and to be realistic have commissioned new pieces. This control they offered four works at most one of which is in the gonfalon repertory – and flush this does not crop up all that time again.

Opening the concert was Sergei Prokofieff’s three-innards Quartet No. 1, Op. 50. It was written in 1931 while the Russian composer was in self-imposed transportation in Paris. He was not a on top of the world man, and the piece, in B-ward, is serious and at times temperate depressing. Whereas most quartets end with a faithful movement, this finale is an Andante that fades away with a extremely soft falling fifth. The players captured the run’s moods admirably.

The concert’s trinket was the 22-infinitesimal Quartet No. 2 by German-born Ulrich Kreppein, who has by the skin of one's teeth turned 30 and is currently working toward a Ph.D. in m�lange at Harvard. Here he is maddening things out, without much star. The three movements fit into a stock moderate-unimaginative-fast line. In the first stirring the cello is asked to bow farther down the bridge or far up the fingerboard. The music seems to be a series of effects that don’t add up to much. The another movement, prevailingly flabby, hangs together sport, while the hyperactive finale contains a torpid section in the central. Kreppein appeared to approve of the Chiara’s committed show.

After intermission came Anton von Webern’s “Five Movements for Concur Quartet,” Op. 5, written in 1909 when the composer was 26. This is his chief atonal spur. And characteristically the music is drastically compressed: the five movements add up to alone 12 minutes of music. The opening movement is a sonata-materialize achieved in 55 measures. The patronize and fourth are 13 bars lengthy and in ternary comprise – both hellishly soft. The third is a description of scherzo, all over before you identify it. The fifth is reasonable half as desire as the first. The players unequivocally have the drama in their bones.

To conclude the evening we got Brahms’ Quintet in G-crucial, Op. 111 (1890). Brahms intended to end his composing livelihood with this sumptuous work, destroyed his sketches, and drew up a on. But then he heard the unforgettable playing of clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, and this inspired him to write disparate more works. For Op. 111 he added to the gonfalon quartet technique a second viola – he continually liked the possibilities of an enriched heart range, and exploited it marvelously here.