Biography

Adam Barnett-Hart - violin
Brendan Speltz - violin
Pierre Lapointe - viola
Brook Speltz - cello

with Roman Rabinovich - piano

“One of the top young quartets before the public today” … “notable for its polish and tonal beauty” … “a dark ambrosial view all its own,” are just a few of the glowing accolades that have been bestowed on the Escher String Quartet. The Quartet takes its name from Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, inspired by Escher’s method of interplay between individual components working together to form a whole. The group was founded in 2005 in New York City, where its original members were studying at the Manhattan School of Music at the time. The Escher Quartet has performed on five continents; among the venues where it has appeared include Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa at the invitation of Pinchas Zukerman. In its hometown of New York, the ensemble serves as Season Artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where it has recently performed quartet cycles of Beethoven and Zemlinsky. In 2013, the Quartet became one of the very few chamber ensembles to be awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant.The ensemble has recorded the complete quartets of Zemlinsky on the Naxos label and the complete quartets of Mendelssohn on the BIS label, both sets to the highest critical acclaim. The Escher’s latest release consists of the two quartets of Ives plus the Barber String Quartet (including the famous Adagio movement) with the addition of the longer, original final movement. Tashkent-born Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich was a winner in the 2008 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2022, following which he was praised by the New York Times for his “uncommon sensitivity and feeling.”

https://escherquartet.com

https://romanrabinovich.net/

Notes

Of Haydn’s eighty-plus string quartets, The Lark is one of the best known. The catchy subtitle helps, of course, but even devoid of ornithological allusion its poise, classical balance, melodic invention, and good cheer combine to proclaim a string quartet of consummate quality. The lark reference is heard in the quartet’s opening moments, where the first violin soars over an accompaniment pattern in the other voices. In contrast to this sonata-form movement, the remaining three are all in ternary form (ABA).

Very few chamber music compositions owe their inspiration to extra-musical sources. Into his Second String Quartet the 74-year-old Janáček poured all the love, passion and ecstasy he felt for Kamila Stösslová, the young woman with whom he was having an affair. It was his last completed work, written at white heat in just three weeks in February of 1928 while he was still madly in love with Kamila. The quartet’s subtitle, “Intimate Letters” (it was originally to have been “Love Letters”), refers to the six hundred or so letters Janáček wrote to Kamila over the course of their relationship. Janáček’s thematic material is unique, instantly recognizable, and unlike that of any other composer. It is idiomatically derived from the natural speech patterns of his native Czech language, both in its melodic profile and rhythmic characteristics.

With its great wealth of melody, propulsive energy, fascinating rhythmic displacements, imaginative power, and epic scope, there are few works in the chamber music repertory to compare with Brahms’s Piano Quintet (1862-64). It opens with a somber, broadly flowing theme firmly anchored in F minor. Two additional elements serve to unify not only this movement but the entire composition are the pervasive use of the interval of the semitone, and a triplet pattern. A relaxed Schubertian charm and gentle lilt infuse the second movement, a simple ternary structure. Biographer Malcolm MacDonald calls the third movement “perhaps the most ‘demonic’ of all Brahms’s scherzi, driven by an apparently unquenchable rhythmic impulse.” The grand design of the finale consists of an exposition and recapitulation without a formal development section in between, all framed by a darkly brooding slow introduction and a passionate, presto coda.

Robert Markow