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FRIEDMAN Quartets

June 1, 2011
The Classical Review

This new coupling of Jefferson Friedman’s Second and Third String Quartets by the Chiara String Quartet brings to disc for the first time one of the crucial partnerships of New York’s live music scene over the past decade and more.

Both works were commissioned by the Chiara ensemble – the Second in 1999, the Third in 2005 – with Friedman, who describes his string quartets as “abstract diary entries” and the act of writing them as “pure expression,” adroitly pushing his players to the limit of their individual and collective strengths and, occasionally, beyond.

The Second Quartet is making its second appearance on disc here, following the Corigliano Quartet’s recording in 2007 on Naxos, where it was coupled with chamber music by that ensemble’s namesake – and Friedman’s onetime tutor – John Corigliano. Certainly, the mentor’s thumbprint is clearly in evidence in the slicing, jabbing chords that announce the first movement, in the emphatic driving momentum of much of what follows, and in the eerily beautiful moments of repose that punctuate it.

But the quartet, composed when Friedman was 24, also demonstrates an astonishing maturity of its own, not least in its probing, prodding, pulsing technical demands; in its ability to marshal rugged declamatory gestures and whispered poetic intimacy; and in the easy fluency and painterly precision with which it negotiates transitions between the two. Indeed, the contrast between the robustly agitated first movement and the elegiac second movement, with its notes of bucolic discordancy faintly reminiscent of Janáček and Bartók, is executed with a telling concision and economy of expression.

The taut, tense third movement also seems to have a Bartókian ghost haunting it, but Friedman infuses it with an improvisatory sense of freedom that allows ample room for manoeuvre, a facet the Chiara players seize upon with considerable aplomb.

The Third Quartet doubly roots itself in the life of the ensemble, the swooning love duet between Julie Yoon’s violin and the cello of Gregory Beaver in the middle movement, titled ‘Act’, warmly alluding to the couple’s announcement of their engagement during its writing; the concluding movement dedicated to the birth of the first daughter of the Chiara’s first violinist, Rebecca Fischer.

The middle movement also boasts an astonishing sequence towards its end where the love duet gives way to a high, heliospheric violin that winds and spirals its way back to earth in a twisting, slow-motion tornado that verges on disintegration before cork-screwing into a dramatic halt.

As with the middle section of the Second Quartet, the concluding ‘Epilogue/Lullaby’ articulates Friedman’s gift for saying more with less, its relative minimalism producing a hauntingly hushed and still coda that evaporates with a delicacy that sounds like Vaughan Williams recast by Henryk Górecki.

Two other tracks here point to, and illuminate, Friedman’s engagement with the sensibilities of popular forms such as rock music and contemporary electronica. Described as ‘remixes’ and created by the experimental electronic duo Matmos – Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt – they offer novel commentaries on the two quartets, the First an engaging, rhythmically vital blend of synthesized pops and clicks and the kind of percussive, industrial-sourced underpinning more readily associated with techno music.

Mix No. 2 is cut from a darker cloth, and one woven from rougher textures, the result a churning cauldron in which ambient sound effects tug, tear and wrestle with Friedman’s original fabric to often disconcerting effect.

Multi-Grammy Award-winning Judith Sherman’s production is as exemplary as you would expect, perfectly framing incisive, intelligent performances by the Chiara String Quartet while offering eloquent testimony to their mutually beneficial partnership with Friedman.

— The Classical Review

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CD Reviews: Jefferson Friedman

May 5, 2011
San Francisco Chronicle

It's a rare thrill to come across new music as exciting, vivacious and downright gorgeous as these two string quartets by young New York composer Jefferson Friedman. It's not just the notes themselves, although those are stunners in their own right - a mix of bubbly post-minimalist rhythmic play and ripe tonal harmonies overlaid with a splendid melodic gift. But what's also striking is how resourcefully and provocatively Friedman handles the quartet medium, splicing together traditional techniques of chords and counterpoint with an explosive rhythmic edge that makes those techniques sound endlessly surprising. He is helped in this by the superb performances of the Chiara String Quartet, which plays with demonic energy, as well as a lush ensemble sound that brings out the hidden depths of Friedman's harmonic language. For the club set, the disc also includes an electronic remix of each piece by the duo Matmos; for the graybeards among us, the originals are already plenty funkalicious on their own.

JEFFERSON FRIEDMAN

QUARTETS

CHIARA STRING QUARTET; MATMOS

NEW AMSTERDAM

$12.38

This article appeared on page P - 37 of the San Francisco Chronicle

— San Francisco Chronicle

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Best. 18 2. Ever.

May 22, 2011
Boston Globe

— Boston Globe

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Classical-Pop Border, No Guards in Sight

January 20, 2011
The New York Times

After kicking off with an exciting eight-hour marathon on Monday, the Ecstatic Music Festival, devoted to collaborations by young artists working on the increasingly permeable border between classical music and pop, began in earnest on Wednesday evening with a concert by the Chiara String Quartet at Merkin Concert Hall.

Programmed by the composer Nico Muhly and featuring music of Mr. Muhly and his longtime collaborator, Valgeir Sigurdsson, the concert was part of the quartet’s “Creator/Curator Project,” which has commissioned both a new work and an evening to surround it from several young composers. Mr. Muhly’s contribution, “Diacritical Marks,” consisted of eight short movements united by a recurring figure, unsettlingly out of breath. It was the kind of pretty, tightly constructed music that this 29-year-old composer has become known for, but with subtle edges: an ominous plucked cello line in the first movement, and the way the sustained tones in the slow sections didn’t quite connect, a hint of dislocation amid the sweet smoothness.

“Diacritical Marks” closed the concert, which was largely devoted to Mr. Sigurdsson’s music. Though primarily known as a producer and sound engineer for Mr. Muhly and other artists, like Bjork and Will Oldham, Mr. Sigurdsson has recently ventured more toward his own composing. Featured here was the premiere of his first traditional, acoustic classical work, “Nebraska.”

The piece was inspired, the Chiara’s violist, Jonah Sirota, said from the stage, by the “big open spaces” of the state where the quartet is based, and there were distant hints of country in virtuosic fiddling passages that evoked both the slowly shifting arpeggios of Minimalism and a surreal hoedown. Discreet percussive effects were reminders of Mr. Sigurdsson’s trademark electronic beats.

The mood shifted in the finale, with glassy harmonics undercut by anxious tremolos. The reflective feel connected “Nebraska” to the other works on the program by Mr. Sigurdsson: four pieces from “Dreamland,” his 2009 documentary film score, arranged by Mr. Muhly, who joined the quartet at the piano. In “Nowhere Land” and “Helter Smelter,” the sound gradually built as the strings sustained chords over muted piano notes. The pieces had the yearning richness associated with elegiac sequences in independent films, but they meandered, and their emotional payoffs — melancholy in the slow moments, exuberant uplift in the fast — felt unearned.

Mr. Muhly showed off Mr. Sigurdsson’s work to excellent advantage alongside similarly dignified, slowly unfurling pieces by the 16th-century composers William Byrd, John Dowland and Orlando Gibbons. Mr. Muhly’s arrangement of Dowland’s Third Lute Fantasy was particularly dazzling, with bursts of ornamentation jumping from instrument to instrument. Placing Mr. Sigurdsson’s work in such exalted company was a risk — one that paid off — as well as a moving compliment from one composer to another.

The Ecstatic Music Festival runs through March 28 at Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan; (212) 501-3300, ecstaticmusicfestival.com.

— The New York Times

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Best Friedman 3 ever

May 22, 2011
Strad Magazine

— Strad Magazine

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The Chiara String Quartet Scheme for the Future

October 20, 2010
Lucid Culture

It’s hard to imagine a more ambitious advocate for new music than the Chiara String Quartet. They may have made a name for themselves playing Brahms and Beethoven – last time we caught them, they played a brilliantly insightful survey of Beethoven quartets from early to late – but they have their sights set on blazing trails for newer composers. They call their latest project Creator/Curator: the concept is to commission a work and have its composer pick the accompanying pieces on the program, debut it in a small venue and then move it to “more traditional classical venues” next season around. You can see the wheels turning: tonight le Poisson Rouge, tomorrow Lincoln Center. If Sunday night’s performance at LPR is any indication, they have their fingers on an important vein.

This particular program was chosen by Gabriela Lena Frank, an important and eclectic voice who, for what it’s worth, won a latin Grammy last year. The first piece on the bill was Alberto Ginastera’s String Quartet No. 1, Op. 20, which the Quartet tackled with equal parts passion and rigor. Cellist Gregory Beaver propelled the fiery staccato of its “allegro violento e agitato” first movement with relish. Violinist Rebecca Fischer’s gentle, fluidly meticulous glissandos lit up its more ambient, delicate second movement. Artfully playing off the open notes in standard guitar tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E), the third movement was delivered with a steely suspense behind Beaver’s incisive pizzicato work and Jonah Sirota’s plaintive viola lines. They wound up the “allegramente rustico” final movement spiritedly with the flavor of a Nordic hardanger dance.

Chou Wen-chung, composer of the following work, Clouds, was present. But rather than establishing a nebulous atmosphere, these clouds take specific shapes. How they morph into other configurations is what makes the piece compelling, from the understated, Asian-inflected drama of the pizzicato opening and closing motifs, to its constantly shapeshifting series of rondo-lets, simple and memorable circular themes bouncing off each other nimbly and playfully to a surprisingly intense, brooding conclusion.

Sirota explained that Frank’s eight-part suite, Milagritos (making its New York premiere) was an exposition of mestizaje, a recurrent theme which for her means celebrating an individual identity drawing from diverse sources – which makes perfect sense in light of her Peruvian-Jewish heritage. Her program notes explained the pieces as illustrations of Peruvian cultural iconography that might seem mundane to others but to her, they’re small miracles. Shrines to accident victims along serpentine mountain roads were portrayed by Julie Yoon’s surprisingly blithe violin against fluttery disquiet, while a stroll alongside Lake Titicaca became a delightfully macabre Bernard Herrmann-esque stalker tableau. Eerie cello cadenzas punctuated stillness in a depiction of pre-Inca panpipe ceremonies; likewise, the jungles were portrayed as impenetrable but with considerable activity lurking just out of range. The suite concluded on a richly haunting, practically stygian note, another roadside shrine scene, Fischer’s long, surgically precise solo passage a vivid contrast with the murky tritone ending. The standing-room-only crowd roared their approval boisterously: if this bill is any indication, the Chiaras’ upcoming concerts in this series will be a treat for the lucky crowds who catch them the first time around in cozy, comfortable confines like these.

— Lucid Culture

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Chiara Quartet conjures ghosts of the Soviet era

March 16, 2009
Boston Globe

You have to admire any concert program that is not only rewarding on its own terms but also serves as a departure point for broader meanderings through history and cultural politics. The Chiara Quartet, in residence at Harvard University, pulled off just that sort of ingenious balancing act with its recital on Friday night in Paine Hall by modeling its program on one devised by the legendary Borodin Quartet in the Soviet Union in 1975.

Think of it as a bit of Brezhnev-era period performance. Actually, if that were strictly the case, this recital would have been canceled. That in fact was the point.

The Borodin's original program, which paired music from the first and the second Viennese schools, was rejected by Soviet cultural bureaucrats in 1975 prompting a clash of wills that proved to be the last straw for Rostislav Dubinsky, the group's first violinist. Not long after this program was banned, he left the country and eventually settled in the United States, where he taught at Indiana University and wrote a wryly disturbing memoir called "Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker's State." It was from that book that the Chiara Quartet - a young American ensemble whose members may or may not have been alive in 1975 - learned of this program. As they rehearsed it for their own recital, they also tried to consider what it was about this music that constituted a threat to the Soviet system.

That deeper question of course could not be answered by a single program but it gave the listener, too, something to mull over while taking in the Chiara's vivid and compelling performances of Berg's Quartet Op. 3, Schoenberg's Second Quartet, and Haydn's "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross."

The night opened with the Berg, a dark-hued work completed in 1910 full of fierce yet mysterious drama. As individual musicians, the members of the Chiara project very different temperatures in their playing - second violinist Julie Yoon for instance drives the inner voices with a sense of smoldering intensity while cellist Gregory Beaver gives off a sense of preternatural coolness and calm - yet the group came together admirably to render this surging expressionistic music with the character and force it demands.

For Haydn's "Seven Last Words," originally written as an oratorio for the Good Friday service, the Chiara found an appropriately somber and even austere group sound, letting the composer's stark chords speak for themselves by using vibrato far more sparingly. Baritone John Kapusta intoned the various "last words" preceding each of Haydn's seven slow movements.

The highlight of the evening however was the performance, following the Berg, of Schoenberg's Second Quartet with the soprano Lucy Shelton, who brought confident vocalism, arresting intensity, and a dazzling array of colors to the Stefan George texts set by the composer in the final two movements.

These stunning movements - full of both the composer's inner torment and the rapturous discovery of "wind from other planets" - made one wonder whether part of the threat that the Soviets perceived as late as 1975 was in the way this music represented a profound turning inward for the sources of art. In other words, private experience is validated - even sacralized - at the implicit expense of the public (socialist) reality that good Soviet art was supposed to celebrate.

The broader irony of course is that the potency of so much modern music in the 20th century was sensed most keenly by its enemies. Or as Lionel Trilling once commented: "if ever we want to remind ourselves of the nature and power of art, we have only to think of how accurate reactionary governments are in their awareness of that nature and that power."

— Boston Globe

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Best Webern Ever

May 22, 2011
Washington Post

— Washington Post

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Experimental, bold approach enlivens Chiara 4’s Beethoven

February 13, 2010
Boston Globe

String quartets tend to celebrate major anniversaries by tackling the Everest of their repertoire, that is, the complete cycle of 16 Beethoven String Quartets. That there are actually three ensembles scaling these heights in the Boston area this season should not take away from the significance that a Beethoven cycle carries in the life of an individual group, especially when it is a maiden voyage.

That is the case this season for the Chiara Quartet, a young and rising ensemble that currently holds a Blodgett residency at Harvard University. The group is marking its tenth anniversary and the 25th of the Blodgett residencies with its first Beethoven cycle, spread over two seasons. The second program in this series took place last night at Paine Hall and featured a quartet from each of Beethoven’s early, middle, and late periods.

The abundant skill and commitment this group brings to its music-making was clear from the opening quartet, Op. 18, No. 3, dispatched with both vigor and sensitivity. The evening’s highlight was the massive hurtling fugue that closed the second work, Op. 59. No. 3. This is perhaps the most adrenaline-laced six minutes of music in the entire string quartet literature, and the Chiara upped the stakes by choosing a very brisk tempo. But they held it together with highly virtuosic, edge-of-the-seat playing that brought the movement across as the viscerally thrilling ride it is.

Being the group’s very first cycle there were, naturally, several places where this performance stood to deepen and grow. The ear yearned for a wider palette of sonorities, though the Chiara was at points trying.

For the slow introduction to Op. 59, No. 3, and again in the majestic slow movement of Op. 132, the evening’s closing work, the Chiara experimented with scaling back its vibrato or doing away with it altogether. The deglossed sound was striking, but the effect was undermined in part by slight tuning imperfections.

The unusually slow tempo chosen for the famous “Heiliger Dankgesang’’ also did not play in the group’s favor. More generally, as this cycle progresses, the Chiara would do well to sharpen the differences in its interpretive approach to the music of the early, middle, and late periods to highlight the true scale of what is, as these players clearly know, an epic journey.

— Boston Globe

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Cycling through town with Beethoven

February 12, 2010
Boston Globe

If you’re a fan of the Beethoven string quartets, your cup is currently running over. Whether by coincidence or a fortuitous alignment of the stars, Boston is in the midst of two overlapping presentations of the complete Beethoven quartets, with a third fast on the horizon.

The Chiara Quartet, in residence at Harvard University, gives the second concert of its Beethoven cycle tonight, while the Muir String Quartet, at Boston University, presents the fifth entry in its cycle on March 3. In April, another Boston foursome - the Borromeo String Quartet - will begin its own cycle at the Gardner Museum. Add to these a visit by the excellent Berlin-based Artemis Quartet with an all-Beethoven program on March 5.

The first complete presentation of Beethoven’s quartets took place in 1845, less than two decades after the composer’s death. But at some point during the 20th century it became a musical sacrament: a rite of passage for any quartet wishing to stake its claim in the music world.

“The Beethoven quartets have always been the Mount Everest of every quartet career,’’ says cellist Paul Katz, “and that’s the way we prove ourselves. It’s like the biggest mountain we can climb.’’

Beethoven’s 16 string quartets - 17 if you count the “Grosse Fuge’’ - constitute arguably the richest and most varied body of chamber music to flow from a single composer’s pen. An ensemble can present the quartets in chronological order, illustrating Beethoven’s development in a single great arc, or by constructing each program from his early, middle, and late phases, presenting that evolution in miniature at each concert. Katz is a knowing guide to this territory. He was a founding member of the Cleveland Quartet, which played almost 30 Beethoven cycles during its 26-year career. Katz recalls in particular the 1988-89 season, in which the Cleveland played the Beethoven cycle in 10 different cities, including New York, Paris, London, and Washington. “We were all over the place [that] season. And it became sort of our thing.’’

The Cleveland’s Beethoven immersion began in 1955 at the University at Buffalo, which presents a six-concert cycle of the Beethoven quartets every year. The unusual arrangement came about thanks to a bequest from a corporate lawyer named Frederick Slee. (His will even specified the order in which the quartets were to be performed.) Many great quartets - including the Budapest, Guarneri, and Emerson - have played part or all of a cycle there.

The Cleveland Quartet shared a Slee Beethoven cycle with the Guarneri in 1971; by 1973 they were playing all six concerts themselves. It was only their fourth season together. That contradicted a sort of unwritten maxim: A Beethoven cycle is something for older, experienced ensembles, not young guns. The presumption that young musicians aren’t ready to scale Everest has mostly to do with the late quartets, inward-facing works that are almost as difficult to understand as to play - the kind of music for which a performer needs not only chops but wisdom and life experience.

But Katz, who now helms the Professional String Quartet Training Program at New England Conservatory, doesn’t buy what he calls “a sort of misplaced sense of reverence’’ that holds these works off limits for young players. He remembers playing Beethoven’s A-minor Quartet, Opus 132, in Munich when he and his fellow Clevelanders were in their 30s and reading a review that said that they were too young to play late Beethoven. “I think that’s a snobbish assumption that doesn’t necessarily hold water.’’

Quartets are accomplishing more earlier in their life cycles, he explains, a consequence of a general rise in playing standards. He teaches a seminar at NEC on the Beethoven quartets and regularly introduces students to the late quartets if he feels they’re technically ready.

“I think it’s a tremendous growth experience,’’ he says. “I love to sort of take a young person in their 20s and make them consider the profundity and the emotional depth of this kind of music.’’

One thing that’s probably universal, regardless of age, is the feeling the musicians have on finishing the cycle, bringing that epic journey to a close. “Oh, it’s unbelievable,’’ Katz remembers. “Every single time we did it, it was thrilling. It never got easy. It always felt just wonderful to have another notch on the belt.’’

Chiara Quartet: tonight at Harvard University; www.chiaraquartet.com

Muir String Quartet: March 3 at Boston University; www.muirstringquartet.org

Artemis Quartet: March 5 at Jordan Hall; www.celebrityseries.org

Borromeo String Quartet: April 4 at the Gardner Museum; www.gardnermuseum.org

A Bach cycle, too

Speaking of cycles, Emmanuel Music is presenting all six of Bach’s keyboard partitas in a series of weekly noontime concerts. Previous years have seen similar offerings of the works for solo violin and cello. The series begins next Thursday with Emmanuel’s associate conductor, Michael Beattie, playing the Fourth Partita, and ends with Robert Levin playing the Sixth on March 25. All concerts are free and take place in the Lindsey Chapel of Emmanuel Church.

www.emmanuelmusic.org

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

— Boston Globe

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Chiara String Quartet Triangle Residency: Day One

September 5, 2008
Classical Voice of North Carolina

September 5, 2008, Chapel Hill, NC: Subtle hints of leaves changing colors, football games, the local universities filling up with returning students, hurricanes, and for the past five years the September Prelude Chamber Music Festival of the Triangle – all signs that the fall season is upon us. Jointly sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill, the William S. Newman Artists Series, Duke Performances, Durham's Chamber Arts Society, and the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild, this three-day event is a rare opportunity to get to know world-class musicians up close and personal and hear three diverse concerts.

This year's artist is the Chiara String Quartet, a young and vibrant quartet who at the completion of this festival will travel to the Duke of the north to assume their new appointment as Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University. With an armful of prestigious prizes, residencies and collaborations with established musicians to inflate their pedigree, the Chiara Quartet is a group dedicated to breaking down barriers between performer and audience.

While their opening concert of this mini-festival at Memorial Hall on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus is not quite the venue for an alternative performing approach, there was plenty of that to come in subsequent concerts.

Even with threats of Hanna the Hurricane approaching, a fairly good size crowd was present to welcome Rebecca Fischer and Julie Yoon, violins, Jonah Sirota, viola, and Gregory Beaver, cello, to Chapel Hill. They began with "Song of the Ch'in," an evocative and atmospheric work composed in 1953 by the prolific Chinese-American composer Zhou Long. This is a work that is a perfect example of the blending of Western and Eastern traditional music: it neither panders nor resorts to overused clichés and leaves you wanting more. All of the players had their turns at simulating techniques and effects that gave the impression of traditional Chinese instruments and for a time transcended the "westernness" of this most classic of traditional musical ensembles.

Moving a bit back in time and somewhat closer to the "normal" string quartet, we heard a stirring performance of Sergei Prokofiev's first string quartet – written in 1931 at the relatively advanced age of forty. An unusual three-movement work ending with an emotional and somber slow movement, this quartet is a masterpiece of the melding of Prokofiev's unique voice within a decidedly neo-classical framework. The Chiara Quartet displayed their considerable technical expertise and rhythmic precision in the manic second movement that alternates between rich, slow passages and flights of wild abandon. All the players appear to have a similar demeanor and playing style – relaxed, effortlessness and with economical physical expenditure.

The second half was taken up with one of the grandest creations in chamber music: Johannes Brahms' String Sextet No. 1. Although a relatively early work, this is Brahms at his greatest and we are grateful that he didn't include this in one of his youthful music-burning episodes. Joining the Chiara Quartet were Anton Jivaev and Bonnie Thron, principal viola and cello, respectively, of the North Carolina Symphony. As is the protocol in these situations, the guest artists took over the second part for their instruments – although there is certainly no such thing as an easy or uninteresting part when it comes to Brahms. The lush and expansive opening movement created a wall of sound that was practically visible. This is the longest movement by far and there could have been a bit more forward propulsion as it became somewhat stagnant at times. The andante movement is a theme and variations gem – one of Brahms' favorite forms. The violists get a chance here to really shine and Chiara's Jonah Sirota, especially, displayed his ravishing tone and projection. In the scherzo there is a chance to lighten up a bit and for all six players to showcase their perfectly synchronized trills.

This was a wonderful, although outwardly traditional concert. It was the next evening's concert at Duke which really showcased their maverick chamber music philosophy. Stay tuned for that.

— Classical Voice of North Carolina

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Chiara String Quartet Triangle Residency: Day Two

September 6, 2008
Classical Voice of North Carolina

September, 6, 2008, Durham, NC: The middle leg of the Chiara String Quartet's three day residency as part of the fifth annual September Prelude Chamber Music Festival of the Triangle took place at the quaint and comfy Nelson Music Room on Duke University's East Campus. After a full day of masterclasses and coaching, and a difficult program the evening before, the Chiara Quartet delivered a phenomenal program full of energy, passion and many surprises. This particular performance was presented by Duke Performances and the Chamber Arts Society of Durham although, as Duke Performances director Aaron Greenwald told the audience, this would not be possible without the extraordinary efforts of Nancy Lambert, executive director of the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild.

Arriving early, as is my usual practice, I entered familiar grounds with a completely different setup. At the request of the guest artists, the Nelson Music Room was transformed to an "in the round" chamber that gave it a living room ambience. The players were seated facing each other in the center of the room with the audience surrounding them on all sides – including what is normally the stage. It was interesting to watch people's reactions as they entered the hall. I chose a seat directly behind the cellist which proved to be an unusual, but personally beneficial vantage point to concentrate on Gregory Beaver's bow arm and tone production.

This concert was listed in the program as "Mozart, Prokofiev, Bartok & Others" but it was the "others" that perhaps elicited the greatest response – and also inspired some brisk CD sales during intermission. The concert was framed by two of Mozart's string quartets from his set of six dedicated to Haydn, and it began with the third. Because of the configuration, everyone was behind one of the players so there was some concern about the balance and sound. This was quickly dispelled as we were awash with the most lush, distinct and naturally reverberant sound that I have ever heard in person. You actually felt the sound, especially the cello with the sound traveling down the endpin into the floor and back up into your seat. When the first movement ended and applause erupted from the balcony, many of the chamber music police became noticeably offended at this unwritten faux pas. Violist Jonah Sirota, sensing this silly cultural divide, stood up and told the audience to feel free to applaud whenever the spirit strikes you.

After the brilliantly played Mozart quartet was finished, the Chiara Quartet shattered another senseless tradition of chamber music concerts: the apparent prohibition on playing just selected movements of a larger work (not counting encores). They repeated from the night before the exhilarating ride of the second movement of Prokofiev's first string quartet and later on they contrasted that with the first movement of Bartók's second quartet. Being so close and familiar with the exceptional difficulty of these works, it was a marvel to experience the maturity, grace and phenomenal technique of these young musicians.

Respecting the past but exploring new paths and composers and avoiding the "museum" effect of chamber music should be a goal of musicians everywhere. During this concert the Chiara Quartet introduced me to a young composer named Jefferson Friedman (b.1974) who has written two string quartets for them. They completely transfigured the audience with their playing of the slow movement of Friedman's second quartet. This is an exemplar of new music that can still be unabashedly tonal and emotional, yet completely new and unexpected. Look for more from this composer. Another lovely miniature was Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout by Peruvian composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Its imitation of indigenous panpipes and the folk music of that culture was authentic and appealing.

After a first half of nearly one and a quarter hours of playing time, the Chiara Quartet took a lengthy respite before returning for the final work: Mozart's so-called "Dissonant Quartet." This name comes from the slow introduction to the first movement which, at least as compared to the harmonic vocabulary of that day, was comparable to chalk squeaking on a blackboard. Today, it's hardly noticeable.

There are conductors, even some in this area, who will have their orchestras play extremely difficult, busy and challenging works, but who balk at performing the mature Mozart symphonies. The deceptive simplicity and purity is precisely what makes Mozart so difficult to play well, but the Chiara String Quartet displayed the wisdom of the ages along with their self-assured technical brilliance in both of the Mozart quartets they performed. Especially impressive was their phrasing, patience, and beauty of tone in two very long andante movements that have the potential to be real snoozers.  

Chiara is an Italian word meaning "clear, pure, or light" and it is an apt description of this quartet's musical footprint. In nearly four hours that I listened to them there was not one murky or unclear moment. Every musical idea was conveyed with clarity, sensitivity and the musical muscle to support their concept of the composition. They have a difficult tightrope to walk: balancing the great tradition of string quartet literature while also expanding the audience, culture and repertoire. They have already succeeded.

— Classical Voice of North Carolina

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Chiara Quartet brings banned music back to life

August 23, 2010
Daily Nebraskan

If you go:
Chiara String Quartet plays “Banned in the USSR”
Where: Lied Center for Performing Arts, 301 N. 12th St.
When: Tonight, 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $36, half price for students under age 18, as well as University of Nebraska-Lincoln students with NCard.

Greg Beaver navigated a New York City airport terminal while describing his string quartet’s opening piece, composed by Alban Berg.

“It’s truly terrifying,” he said. “It sounds like a horror movie at times. It’s exciting, dark and seething.”

Beaver, cellist for the internationally known Chiara String Quartet, was on his way to Lincoln for tonight’s evening concert at the Lied Center for Performing Arts, 12th and R streets.

At 7:30 p.m. tonight, the quartet will be presenting three pieces from a program censored by officials in the former Soviet Union.

Understandably, then, the title of tonight’s program is “Banned in the USSR.”

“There’s a lot of history behind these pieces,” Beaver said. “Any works of art that the Soviet Union found dangerous to them, they outlawed.”

The program the Chiara String Quartet will be performing was a planned concert by the Borodin String Quartet, which was never allowed to play the lineup in public. Beaver and company heard about the music in a book, “Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Worker’s State.”

Since reading it, the Chiara String Quartet’s members have been fascinated with the forbidden music of the Soviet Union era, Beaver said.

“That music was the life of the artists.”

Pam Thompson, marketing director for the Lied, saw the Chiara String Quartet play in January, and said she’s excited to see the performance today.

“It’s so great to have skillful, classically trained musicians performing,” Thompson said. “They have a great international reputation and many fans.”

Soprano Lucy Shelton, who will join the quartet in Lincoln, has made a name for herself singing similar musical works.

Beaver lives in Lincoln and teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

He’s glad to be coming back, he said. The Chiara String Quartet “tours portable, like a small rock band.”

After tonight’s performance, the quartet will return to New York City for a series of shows at Columbia University. Appearances elsewhere in the United States, Canada and Germany are planned for this year.

<“It’s very powerful music,” Beaver said. “It’s reflections of the cultural and political conflicts that are very much a reality of our lives.>

“The music expands on itself. You don’t have to know all about the music to experience it.”

anthonytroester@dailynebraskan.com

— Daily Nebraskan

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Bringing Disparate Ethnic and Cultural Worlds Together

January 13, 2007
New York Times

As high-concept programs go, it would be hard to beat the one the Chiara String Quartet brought to Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday evening. Under the title Mestizaje: Harmony of Differences, the group offered works in which disparate musical, ethnic and cultural influences mingle (the meaning of the Spanish word in the title, at least as the quartet is using it). The programs two halves were listed as acts, with the stage bathed in red light during the performances and dark between them.

For all that, there were only four works on the program. But the musicians found an unusual way to stretch their resources: they used the six movements of Gabriela Lena Franks Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001) as a frame for the other pieces. The first two movements opened the concert; the third and fourth ended the first half; and the fifth and sixth closed the performance. In effect, the four works became six segments.

Ms. Franks score was composed for the Chiara players, who recently released a recording of it as a CD single on their own New Voice Singles label. Parts of the work are models of European classicism, with fleeting passages calling to mind Beethoven and Tchaikovsky quartets.

Yet South American folk themes are more prominent, and through much of the work, the ensemble s business is evoking Andean folk instruments, from panpipes to guitars. Pizzicato writing is plentiful and yields a tactile texture that, together with the works easygoing harmony and periodic bursts of energy, gives it an immediate appeal.

Enlisting Bartok for a program of boundary-crossing works may be too easy, but the Chiara was clearly unable to resist. Still, in the Quartet No. 2, themes built on moves from Hungarian and Romanian folk song are enveloped in the more intensely chromatic, emotionally charged harmonies of Bartoks more formal music.

Similar extremes, and a greater depth of anguish, drive Osvaldo Golijovs Yiddishbbuk (1992). And Zhou Longs Song of the Chin (1982) used techniques heard in both the Bartok and Frank works: Chinese folk melodies offset freely chromatic, pulse-free modernist passages, and the quartet, again playing pizzicato, sometimes imitated the chin, a zither.

The Chiara Quartet gave these works luminous performances, underlining the sweet-toned character of Ms. Frank's score and the mystery and exoticism of Mr. Zhou's work. But the best performances were searing accounts of the Bartok and Golijov pieces, for which the players produced a tone that ranged from glowing warmth to hard-edged acerbity, which each of these searing works demands.

— New York Times

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The Return of the Chiara String Quartet

May 30, 2008
Grand Forks Herald

>Members of the Chiara String Quartet, who will return to Grand Forks to teach at the weeklong Red River Chamber Music Festival, have several reasons for loving to perform the music of American composer and rock band musician Jefferson Friedman.

They’ve known Friedman since they all were graduate students at Juilliard together, and he wrote String Quartet No. 2 and No. 3 for them. And, in the past, quartet member Rebecca Fischer said, people in Grand Forks really have liked hearing them play Friedman’s work.

“Jefferson’s music is really, really amazing,” Fischer said last week in a telephone interview from her Lincoln, Neb., home. “It’s kind of liked by everyone we’ve encountered. Probably, the best word I can use is that it’s incredibly intense. It’s influenced by alternative rock and roll. Then, it will break into something that’s really beautiful and sounds like the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard.”

Fischer, a violinist, and other members of the quartet — Julie Yoon, violin; Gregory Beaver, cello; and Jonah Sirota, viola — will be in Grand Forks on Sunday through June 7 for the Red River Chamber Music Festival, a learning and performance event at UND for high school and college strings players.

The fourth annual music festival is sponsored by the Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra and North Dakota Eye Clinic with support from the UND Department of Music. It will feature five public performances, including a concert by the Chiara String Quartet featuring works by Friedman and Mozart at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the North Dakota Museum of Art. Admission will be $15 and $5.

Tuesday’s program will include String Quartet No. 2 and String Quartet No. 3 by Friedman and Mozart’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, K. 428. The Chiara String Quartet just has recorded both Friedman pieces and plans to release them on CD, Fischer said.

Traveling performers

The Chiara Quartet first came to Grand Forks in September 2000 for a two-year artist-in-residence program sponsored by Chamber Music America. The Red River Chamber Music Festival was founded as an extension of their work in 2005. In Nebraska, the Chiara teaches and runs the university’s chamber music program. The school understands that most of the quartet’s work is performing, Fischer said.

“So, for example, they really advocate us going out and having our touring career,” she said. “We’re on the road about a third of the year. When we go out and play in a concert in New York, say, that’s kind of highlighting our role at Nebraska.”

This fall, they’ll begin a visiting artist in residency at Harvard University, traveling there four times a year and staying for a week at a time.

The day of Fischer’s interview, she said she’d been working in her garden even though it was raining. She is married and has a 3½-year-old child. Like most of the rest of the world, she and the other members of the quartet struggle to balance their professional lives and their love of music with family time.

“That’s a real struggle for chamber music ensembles,” she said. “There’s so much to having a career and so much traveling. But you have to be able to say, families are the most important thing to us, even though we love our music so much.”

Besides the Red River festival, the Chiara String Quartet will be at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Chamber Music Institute and will spend five weeks in western Massachusetts at a chamber music camp for high school students. They’ll play a number of concerts on the East Coast as well, she said.

Of the Chiara Quartet’s most recent appearance in New York, The New York Times called its performance “luminous.” The Times continued: “The best performances were searing accounts of the Bartók and Golijov pieces, for which the players produced a tone that ranged from glowing warmth to hard-edged acerbity, which each of these searing works demands.”

Back in Grand Forks

The quartet likes coming back to Grand Forks, Fischer said, especially for the festival. They will teach and perform and work with members of the community, such as musician and teacher Naomi Welsh and Jennifer Tarlin, executive director of the symphony orchestra, who work every day with local musicians, students and groups.

“We’ve had such a good time in the past few years,” Fischer said. “We are always looking for reasons to come back to Grand Forks. So we thought it would be a really great thing to come back and work with students from the area that we’ve watched grow up.”

N.D. students

Several of the young people they met in Grand Forks are now their students at Nebraska, she said, including David Boese, Grand Forks, and Derek Mosloff, Thief River Falls, and Rebecca Ryan, who will be a student at Nebraska in the fall.

“My theory is that North Dakotans have a really great work ethic, which is something we experienced when we lived there,” Fischer said. “When students want to accomplish something, they really make it happen.”

The Chiara trained at The Juilliard School, mentoring for two years with the Juilliard Quartet as recipients of the Lisa Arnhold Quartet Residency, at the Yellow Barn Music School and Festival, and at the Aspen Music Festival, working with some of the most inspiring people in the chamber music world. Chiara (pronounced key-ARE-uh) is an Italian word, meaning “clear, pure or light.”

— Grand Forks Herald

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Harvard Portrait: Chiara Quartet

January 1, 2009
John Harvard's Journal

When Julie Yoon joined the Chiara String Quartet in 2000, she not only gave up a spot in a master’s program at Juilliard, but also agreed to pull up stakes in New York City and put them down in Grand Forks, North Dakota.The Manhattan-based quartet had won a rural residency grant, but had lost its second violinist to an arm injury. Those left (Rebecca Fischer on violin, Jonah Sirota on viola, and Gregory Beaver on cello) needed a replacement.“The fact that they were going to North Dakota to do this residency,” Yoon says, “was a strong indication of what kind of people they were and what kind of group they wanted to be.” The players aim to be musical pioneers in both what and where they perform: Haydn to Schoenberg, in concert halls, company cafeterias, schools, and even nightclubs. Now, as the Blodgett Artists-in-Residence, they will spend 12 weeks (spread across three academic years) teaching and performing at Harvard. Group members say they went out West because that afforded so many opportunities to play (albeit sometimes at schools at 7 A.M., with half-frozen fingers). They also had time to settle on ways to resolve disputes. In an orchestra, notes Beaver, “You can play with people you have active lawsuits against. Not so much in a quartet.” (“At least [the quartet] won’t last,” adds Fischer.) They have since spent two years in New York in a residency with the Juilliard String Quartet, and now hold a long-term position at the University of Nebraska that enables them to spend 60 percent of their time traveling and performing. “That’s really why we do this,” explains Sirota. “We also love to teach, but performance comes first.”

— John Harvard's Journal

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Review: Chiara Quartet continues excellence in Sheldon series

March 23, 2010
Lincoln Journal Star

The Chiara Quartet continued its presentation of Beethoven string quartets Tuesday evening for the "Tuesday Nights at Sheldon" Hixson-Lied Concert Series presented by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Music.

The three quartets heard Tuesday were the "String Quartet in F Major," Opus 18; the "String Quartet in F Minor," Opus 95; and the late period "String Quartet in E-Flat Major," Opus 127.

Chiara players are young and it is now spring, so no wonder the first movement of the F major quartet had such a brisk pace. Violinist Rebecca Fischer kept that pace with a steady hand on it all.

Nice tempo-bending in the slower second movement paved the way for cohesiveness in the Scherzo, and by the time the allegro finale had breezed by, the group's effort had won hearts in the house.
Chiara kept up the pace for the "Serioso," last of the "middle" period quartets.

Alluring bowing of the second movement's second theme by violist Jonah Sirota was key to marketing this section to the 150 patrons in the Abbott Auditorium.

Then Chiara poured on the schmaltz for the first part of the final movement, bending phrases and milking longer notes. It was a stark contrast to the final three minutes of the work, which jetted by with super speed.

Stamina and drive were to be the keys to success for executing the imposing E-flat major quartet.
The long, taxing adagio second movement was an exercise in teamwork.

Everyone traded off the melody phrases beautifully.
The scherzando required precision, and the quartet answered with an amazing response. Difficult rhythms seemed a trifle for this well-molded ensemble.

The finale required more of the same drive. A real crowd-pleaser was Fischer's perfection with the highest notes, pushing the edge with razor-sharp intonation. Immediately at the work's conclusion the crowd stood and cheered.

A postscript: After his concert at the Lied Center for Performing Arts on Sunday, cellist Yo-Yo Ma eagerly awaited visiting with the quartet, embracing them with praise for their work. It was a tribute to the Chiara Quartet's marked growth at UNL.

Especially notable is the maturing of violinist Fischer.

She has immersed herself in the quartet genre with notable progress the past four years.


— Lincoln Journal Star

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Chiara String Quartet to present Beethoven Cycle

December 11, 2009
Lincoln Journal Star

What: Chiara String Quartet

Where: Kimball Recital Hall, 11th and R streets

When: 3:30 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $5, $3 students/seniors; 472-4747

So does the Chiara String Quartet have any plans to record the Beethoven Cycle anytime soon?

According to violinist Rebecca Fischer, let's not get the cart before the horse.

First, she said, a quartet works its way up to playing the cycle, which comprises 15 string quartets (16 counting the "Grosse Fuga").

Chiara, together since 2000, is now ready.

The string quartet will perform three of Beethoven's string quartets in the inaugural concert of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Hixson-Lied Concert Series at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at Kimball Recital Hall.

It will be the first time UNL will present the artists-in-residence in a subscription concert series. Chiara will perform all of Beethoven's string quartets in six concerts over the next two years.

The foursome - Fischer, Julie Yoon (violin), Gregory Beaver (cello) and Jonah Sirota (viola) - also will perform the cycle at Harvard University and Smith College in Massachusetts.

Chiara, in residence at UNL since 2005, will begin the series with Beethoven's String Quartet in F major, Op. 135; String quartet in C minor, Op. 18 No. 4 and String Quartet in F major, Op. 59 No. 1. Upcoming concerts are set for Jan. 26 and March 23.

"This is a huge undertaking for us," Fischer said. "It's an extremely demanding amount of music. What Beethoven demands of its performers is pretty great."

To put it into context, Fischer's father performed the cycle 36 times in his 16-year career. By the time Chiara finishes its concert series, the group will have three cycles under its belt.

This will be the first performance of it in Lincoln since 1990, when the Friends of Chamber Music presented a variety of groups doing it over the course of their season.

Fischer said concertgoers are in for a treat because "each piece is so different," she said.

"The last piece he wrote was a string quartet," she added.

And once Chiara performs the cycle a few more times, then it may consider recording it, Fischer said.

Maybe.

"I don't know," she said. "It's just one of those things. ... To do the cycle is a benchmark in itself. On top of that, you need the time and money to do (a recording). Maybe sometime in the future. When we feel we're ready."

— Lincoln Journal Star

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Chiara charms in Friends debut

January 29, 2011
Houston Chronicle

It’s sweet to get the special honor of a debut on the 50th anniversary season of the Houston Friends of Chamber Music. The Chiara String Quartet responded with a musically brilliant thank you.  The group’s performance for the city’s leading sponsor of touring ensembles — the Chiara has appeared elsewhere in Houston— wasn’t the only first Tuesday at Rice University.  The musical news was the premiere of another fascinating, stylish and haunting work by Gabriela Lena Frank, a Rice alumna whose mother was born in Peru. 

Milagros made me very happy that composers were freed from the constraint of rigid formality at the end of the 19th century.  If a listener were searching for a musical antecedent for Frank’s work, it might be the socalled character pieces that are a feature of 19thcentury piano music.  (An example is Robert Schumann’s Carnaval with titles for individual movements such as Pierrot and Arlequin, after the commedia dell’arte characters.) “Usually a religious and marvelous occurrence, ‘milagro’ here refers to the sights and sounds of Peru’s daily life, both past and present that I’ve stumbled upon in my travels,” Frank wrote in her program note. The slice-of-life snippets were highly personalized, starting with the opening solo lament/ monologue for the second violin.  My favorite was Adios a Churin about a near-ghost town, sketched in music through melancholic imitations of guitar music and aching cello solo music.  Frank writes in a distinctly modern yet communicative style. Milagros was a wonderfully evocative set of freewheeling reactions that could be appreciated for its human impressions or its strictly musical skill.

Another surprising first of the evening was the opening work: Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 18, No. 5, getting its first performance on a Friends concert, a board member noted in opening remarks. Here the Chiara showed an absolutely pleasurable style of playing chamber music. The group — including first violinist Rebecca Fischer, daughter of Rice cello professor Norman Fischer— was hypersensitive to changes of moods that, in the first movement, occurred almost phrase to phrase. More generally, they showed the magical touch of being able to perform chamber music with great emotional variety and intensity without reverting to the heavyhanded overplaying that many better-known groups habitually, and perhaps lazily, employ.  Brahms Quartet, Op 51, No. 1, brought further proof of that special quality. In a few moments, the Chiara folk almost lost it, but overall the interpretation was filled with character, nuance and absolutely charming music-making.

— Houston Chronicle

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Purification of the Calmdome

September 3, 2010
Omaha.net

We lay, bodies on bodies, nestled inside the shell of a giant ovary called CalmDome, bass trickling down our spines. This is not the concert I had in mind.

But it’s exactly why I should go to the Bemis more often. Not only to see art, but to be a part of it.

Monday, August 30, was the Purification of the CalmDome, a joining of forces to send the hulking, ovoid dome, created by art collective Carnal Torpor, off packing towards its next destination. In support were Daniel Higgs (Baltimore, MD), Ember Schrag (Lincoln, NE), and the Chiara String Quartet (Lincoln, NE).

CalmDome

The CalmDome is a Brobdingnaggian egg fitted with speakers and a ominous video screen. The first time I visited the Hopey Changey exhibit, I’ll admit that I didn’t have an overly positive reaction to it: crawl in, sit, crawl out. Alone.

Tonight was different.

Folded upon each other like autumn leaves, the CalmDome is the type of exhibit that causes you to confront humanity. Inside I felt remarkably comfortable, surrounded by the kind of warm pressure you might get squeezing too many people into the back seat of the car. This elicits the same response: at first, everyone jokes and glances furtively. Then you settle into the stasis, the feeling of co-human protection, the pleasure of touch.

And then the music starts.

At first it is just sound, hummed by the girl next to you, harmonized by the boy across, and picked up by the CalmDome’s microphones, reflected back at you through its many speakers as waves. If you can let go—which is hard—but if you truly can, it only gets more fun, bellowing at the top of your lungs, an animal collective imbricated in sound. Together, you will find the point of maximum vibration, falling in love with each murmur, whistle, and call.

The acoustics of the CalmDome reminded me of a throat singer I saw in Mongolia— but you bring your own experience—eyes, closed, floating away from Omaha, NE, and deeply, and for once honestly, reconnecting with your past.

The best part is that the CalmDome remained open all night. Like teenagers at a family party slipping off for clandestine rounds of spiked eggnog, throughout the evening people would get up, wander over to the dome, and become lost to the world, only to stumble back smiling.

The Chiara String Quartet

The Chiara String Quartet are a fiendishly talented group of musicians who remind you that classical music was once the rock of its day: edgy, avant-garde, and full of life. Violinists Rebecca Fischer and Julie Yoon, cellist Gregory Beaver, and violist Jonah Sirota are Lincoln-based, but have residencies as far afield as Harvard University. The group’s energy was deftly balanced with the intimacy of the Bemis space: every breath seemed timed, every foot tap rhythmically accounted for, and on this evening of musical interactivity, I was reminded how exciting it can be to see performers without the barrier of a stage. A string quartet at full bore is as animated as any group of musicians, all the more so at arm’s length.

Ember Schrag

The list of non-pop female singer/songwriters is not as long as the 60s might have portended. Aside from a brief Lilith Fair revival period, history doesn’t reveal as many female artists as you’d hope. Well, add Ember Schrag to the list. Her astute lyrics (she references the Old Testament on “In the Desert” and opened up “Mosaic” with the delicious line, “I hung out with Allen Ginsberg last night”) and breathy vocals are not entirely dissimilar from All Young Girls Are Machine Guns, an Omaha- based artist who makes her bones on the ukulele. Pressed for a guitar driven comparison, I might offer up Laura Veirs, which is healthy praise in my book.

Ember Schrag’s pairing with Chiara—their first ever—was pitch perfect, and will hopefull be repeated despite hectic touring schedules. Amidst a solid 2 1/2 months on the road, the singer swings by the Slowdown on September 17th.

Daniel Higgs

Rarely will you will more spiritually infused assault on the Bible than the throbbing vibrato of Daniel Higgs. His warm baritone intones, “Let’s go insane / Oh, so sane”, and it’s hard to see if Higgs’ tongue is placed firmly in cheek.

Surviving somehow on the strength of his voice, a captivating charisma, and the hum of a instrument that defies my attempts to Google it (it’s a free-reed aerophone of sorts, a buzz-creating box, similar to a one note accordian), Higgs is another preacher posing as a musician. Wryly funny, and extremely capable on banjo, he’s carved out a career spanning two full decades in the Baltimore hardcore scene as part of the band Lungfish. Tonight he offered up the pulpit to any who wanted to join him. In his presence, none felt capable.

— Omaha.net

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Works That Span a Century and a Variety of Modern Moods

April 29, 2010
New York Times

Just before the Chiara String Quartet played Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet on Wednesday evening at Le Poisson Rouge, the group’s first violinist, Rebecca Fischer, pointed out that the work was 101 years old. There was a sense of wonder in her tone — an unspoken subtext that seemed to ask, “Can you believe that people still hear this antique as harsh modernism?” Ms. Fischer added that for her, the movements are five “tiny landscapes.”

When the musicians put bows to strings, they delivered a nuanced performance that suggested that Webern’s 1909 score accommodates, and perhaps demands, conflicting points of view. They embraced the late Romanticism from which the music is mined, playing parts of the first movement with a lush, pulsing vibrato that made its turn-of-the-century Viennese origins unmistakable, and bathing the finale in an emotional, warm glow.

But they did not shy away from Webern’s restlessness with tonal harmony. Every angular theme, scampering pizzicato line and densely ambiguous chord received its due, and the quartet did nothing to prettify Webern’s most aggressive writing.

It may seem odd that the Webern should have been the standout in a program that also included Steve Reich's “Different Trains” (1988), a work that has become a post-Minimalist classic, and Jefferson Friedman’s invitingly rich-textured String Quartet No. 2 (1999), which was written for this group. And it was not that the newer works were played with any less passion or polish. Perhaps it was because the Webern has receded into the musical past that the Chiara’s deeply personalized performance sounded so vital.

Mr. Friedman’s quartets — three so far — suggest that Romanticism could easily have continued without serialist (or even Minimalist) detours, and that it need not sound dated or derivative. That said, you sense the ghosts of Mr. Friedman’s predecessors at times: The second of this quartet’s three movements has a quiet intensity and a bittersweet harmonic flow that calls Vaughan Williams to mind. But mostly, Mr. Friedman’s writing is as vigorous and inventive as it is melodic, and you had to admire the gamesmanship of his finale, with contrasting and increasingly assertive bowed and pizzicato lines circulating among the four players.

The ensemble was least successful in Mr. Reich’s work. The score asks listeners to meditate on the contrast between the comfortable passenger trains the young Mr. Reich rode in the United States during the 1940s and the cattle cars in which European Jews were taken to concentration camps. Interviews with Pullman car porters and Holocaust survivors, though chopped into the rhythmic figures that shape the music, provide the necessary imagery, but on Wednesday, they could not be heard clearly. The Chiara players evoked the changeable rhythms and timbres of train travel perfectly. For this work, that is not enough.

— New York Times

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No sweat is eerie

May 22, 2011
Philadelphia Inquirer

— Philadelphia Inquirer