Subscriptions and single tickets now on sale for SEASON 15
Ives Quartet Season 15
FALL: From Opera To Quartet
St. Mark’s: Friday, November 1, 2013, 8PM
Old First Concerts: Sunday, November 3, 2013, 4PM
Benjamin Britten: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94
Giacomo Puccini: I Crisantemi
Giuseppe Verdi: String Quartet in E minor
Beloved opera composers, Verdi, Puccini and Britten, also wrote a handful of gems for string quartet. Our program honors Britten’s centennial and Verdi’s bicentennial with performances of Britten’s last and Verdi’s single quartet, his only purely instrumental work. Puccini’s elegiac movement is one of his rare contributions to quartet literature and the only one still in the repertory.
WINTER: Each an Experiment
St. Mark’s: Friday, February 21, 8PM
Old First Concerts: Sunday, February 23, 2014, 4PM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: String Quartet in E-flat major, K.428
Henry Cowell: String Quartet No. 3, Mosaic
Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80
The searching Mozart, the experimenting Cowell and the grieving Mendelssohn make up the winter program. In emulation of Haydn, Mozart seeks a more complex quartet style while Cowell’s Mosaic is just that—a free-form composition whose movements can be played in any order. Mendelssohn’s last major work before his death, the F minor quartet, is subtitled “Requiem for Fanny” in memory of his beloved sister.
SPRING: East and West
St. Mark’s: Friday, April 25, 2014, 8PM
Old First Concerts: Sunday, April 27, 2014, 4PM
Julian Waterfall Pollack: String Quartet, co-commissioned with Telluride Music Festival
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: String Quartet No.3 in E-flat minor, Op.30
Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Quintet, in G minor, Op.57, guest pianist Miles Graber
Bay area native, Julian Waterfall Pollack, is an accomplished composer and a consummate jazz artist whose love of classic standards, romantics and minimalism influence this new work written for the IQ. Because of its deeply felt and immediately popular Andante funebre, Tchaikovsky’s Third Quartet, written in memory of a colleague, was played in memorial performances for the composer himself. For Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, a 1940 masterpiece drawing inspiration from Bach, our good friend Miles Graber will join IQ.
MUSIC IN CONTEXT
Palo Alto Salon Series
Sundays at 4PM
October 6, 2013
Giuseppe Verdi: “Is There Opera in Here?”
Giuseppe Verdi, almost exclusively an opera composer, wrote one solely instrumental work, his String Quartet in E minor. What in Verdi’s unique voice travels across these seemingly disparate genres? IQ looks into the effect Verdi’s operative writing had on our musical decisions and rehearsal process.
March 9, 2014
Henry Cowell: California Maverick
We’ll focus on Mosaic and United, the third and fourth of Cowell’s quartets. What is experimental about these pieces? How do they fit into what was considered “modern” in Cowell’s time?
May 18, 2014
Julian Pollack: Popular music becomes “Classical”
Composer Julian Waterfall Pollack and IQ explore those qualities that cross-traditional boundaries in the composer’s new work. How did Pollack’s love of vernacular music find its way into the structure of a string quartet?