Biography

Jeffrey Myers  -  violin             
Ryan Meehan  -  violin 
Jeremy Berry  -  viola        
Estelle Choi  -  cello

One of the most exciting ensembles to emerge on the chamber music scene in recent years is the Calidore String Quartet, noted for its fiery brilliance, musicianship, and palpable energy. Formed in 2010 at the prestigious Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, the Calidore String Quartet has been described as “a miracle of unified thought” (La Presse, Montreal) and as “four highly intelligent, deeply sensitive virtuosos” (Strings magazine). Using an amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its home of origin, Los Angeles, California (the “golden state”). The Calidore Quartet, now based in New York City, made international headlines in 2016 as the Grand-Prize winner of the first M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the largest prize for chamber music in the world (U.S. $100,000). The Quartet has served as artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto, University of Michigan, and Stony Brook University; it is currently in residence at the University of Delaware as well as with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Last year the Quartet released the late Beethoven quartets on the Signum Classics label to great critical acclaim. During the current season the complete cycle is scheduled for release. 4th LMMC concert.

https://www.calidorestringquartet.com/

Notes

Beethoven’s first works in the medium of the string quartet were the six Op. 18 quartets, written between 1798 and 1800 and published in 1801. They are Janus-faced works revealing their stylistic debt to the Viennese tradition of Haydn and Mozart, but also indicating new directions in which Beethoven was headed. Distinctly Beethovenian qualities in these works include an inherent robust character and the transferral of the weightiest movement to the finale. The key of C minor (the key of Op. 18, No. 4)  held a special importance for Beethoven, and many of his more significant utterances are in this key, each imbued in a different way with dramatic tension

Like Beethoven, Korngold was not born in Vienna but made it his musical and spiritual home for most of his life. The decade from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties saw Korngold in Hollywood, turning out film scores to such classics as Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. After World War II he returned to Vienna to resume a career of writing serious concert music, but before leaving America he wrote his Third String Quartet in 1944-1945. This was the first concert work in which Korngold incorporated themes from his films, a move he made assuming that his film scores would soon be forgotten. (How wrong he was!). Themes from Between Two Worlds (Korngold’s own favorite film score), The Sea Wolf, and Deception can be detected in the second, third, and fourth movements respectively.

A quarter of a century separates Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 127, written in 1824-1825, from the one that opens today’s program. This is the first of the five so-called “late quartets,” each a mighty masterpiece. True, they are long, complex, and intensely personal, often introspective statements. But for the serious listener prepared to abandon worldly cares and concerns for thirty or forty minutes in search of a transcendent musical experience, there are no more rewarding works than these late quartets. Op. 127 is actually considered by many listeners to be the most approachable and accessible of the late quartets, perhaps because of its pervasive lyricism. But several other qualities place it unequivocally in company with Beethoven’s late works: extremes of range, sudden moves into foreign harmonic regions, highly contrapuntal textures, and frequent and dramatic shifts in dynamic levels.

Robert Markow