The Alexander String Quartet almost always has a Saturday morning series at Herbst, accompanied by talks by composer/musicologist Robert Greenberg. This year's series is called Music as a Mirror of Our World: The String Quartet from 1905 to 1946. The title is....partially correct. It's a mirror of our world if you think only white men compose string quartets.
Here's the programming for the full series. For each concert, I've suggested an alternative quartet they might have programmed.
Program 1: Austria. Quartets by Schoenberg and Webern. Add Johanna Beyer String Quartet 1 or 2.
Program 2: Russia. Quartets by Stravinsky and Prokofiev. No obvious pick here, so let's go for the unknown-to-me Varvara Adrianovna Gaigerova, who wrote two strings quartets.
Program 3: Czechoslovakia. Quartets by Haas and Janacek. Vítězslava Kaprálová wrote eight string quartets; take your pick.
Program 4: United States. Quartets by Barber and Piston. Add Ruth Crawford Seeger's sole quartet.
Program 5: Austria. Quartets by Zemlinsky and Korngold. The loveliest girl in Vienna didn't get to write a string quartet, so let's move on to Johanna Müller-Hermann, who wrote two.
Program 6: United Kingdom: Quartets by Walton and Britten, both English, so "United Kingdom" isn't exactly accurate. Let's take any of Elizabeth Maconchy's superb quartets that were written in or before 1946.
My article Lend Me a Pick Ax was published in 2008, and I'm still having to write blog posts like this.
5 comments:
The great Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina wrote four string quartets. The two that I've heard are outstandingly good; the others probably are too. Her large body of work has a very high standard, and has never disappointed me yet, in the eight or ten encounters I've had with it.
From one of my American composer faves -- Shulamit Ran:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBt_8mQm33Y&t=15s
They're both great composers, Tod and Nancy, but there is a later bound of 1946 for this series. Gubaidulina's quartets came later than late and Ran wasn't born yet. Same for Saariaho, whom I would have nominated for Terra Memoria.
Later than THAT (1946)...
YES!
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