Chiara Quartet
Oct 12: Chiara Quartet gives world premiere of Milagros by Gabriela Lena Frank in Houston
October 12, 2010
Chiara String Quartet
presented by the Houston Friends of Chamber Music
featuring the world premiere of Milagros by Gabriela Lena Frank
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 7:30pm
Stude Concert Hall | Shepherd School of Music
Rice University, Houston
Tickets: $15-70 at www.houstonfriendsofchambermusic.org or 713.348.5400
Program:
Beethoven: String Quartet in A Major, Op. 18. No. 5
Gabriela Lena Frank: Milagros (World Premiere)
Brahms: String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 51 No. 1
"truly breathtaking" – The Washington Post
Houston, TX —At 7:30pm on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 the Chiara Quartet (Rebecca Fischer and Julie Yoon, violins; Jonah Sirota, viola; and Gregory Beaver, cello) will perform at Rice University’s Stude Concert Hall in Houston, presented by the Houston Friends of Chamber Music. The concert features the world premiere of Milagros (Miracles), a new work commissioned by the Chiara Quartet and the Houston Friends of Chamber Music from composer Gabriela Lena Frank. The program also includes Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Major, Op. 18 No. 5 and Brahms’ String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 51 No. 1.
Gabriela Lena Frank, a Rice University alumna, is one of the country’s leading younger composers, and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship winner. Identity has always been at the center of Frank's music. Born in Berkeley, California, to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Frank explores her multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Frank is something of a musical anthropologist. She has travelled extensively throughout South America and her pieces reflect and refract her studies of Latin-American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own. Milagros is inspired by the sounds and personalities of Andean lands, and is a celebration of the 10 years of mutual growth that Frank and the Chiara Quartet have enjoyed together.
Described by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as "vastly talented, vastly resourceful, and vastly committed to the music of their time," the Chiara (which is celebrating its 10th anniversary season this year) has commissioned and premiered new music for string quartet since its inception. This is the third piece that the ensemble has commissioned from Gabriela Lena Frank. The first, Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout, was premiered in 2001 and released on the Chiara’s New Voice Singles label in 2007. The second, Ghosts in the Dream Machine, was written for the Chiara and pianist Simone Dinnerstein in 2005.
The New York premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s new piece will take place on October 17 at (le) Poisson Rouge, the West Village venue known for presenting an electric array of music across genres, as part of the Chiara’s Creator/Curator program. Other young composers commissioned this year as part of Creator/Curator include Nico Muhly, Huang Ruo, and Daniel Ott. The composers were asked to create new works for string quartet, then curate musical programs to surround these new pieces. In past years, the Chiara has commissioned works from composers Jefferson Friedman, Robert Sirota, Thierry Tidrow and Matthew Ricketts.
Renowned for bringing fresh excitement to traditional string quartet repertoire as well as for creating thoroughly insightful interpretations of new music, the Chiara String Quartet captivates and enthralls its audiences throughout the country. Over its first decade, the Chiara has established itself as among America’s most respected ensembles, lauded for its “highly virtuosic, edge-of-the-seat playing” (The Boston Globe).
The Chiara Quartet’s honors include a top prize at the Paolo Borciani International Competition, winning the Astral Artistic Services National Audition, and winning First Prize at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. Awarded the Guarneri Quartet Residency Award for artistic excellence by Chamber Music America, the Chiara Quartet has also been the recipient of grants from Meet The Composer and the Amphion Foundation.
This season, the Chiara will see two touchstone record releases that illustrate the ensemble's versatility. New Amsterdam Records will release the Chiara's recording of composer Jefferson Friedman's String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3. Both celebrated pieces, which "already deserve to be heard as classics of this decade" (The New York Times) were commissioned by the Chiara, and are the result of a more than ten-year friendship with the composer. In addition, the Chiara will release its recording of the complete string quartets of Brahms, plus Brahms' String Quintet in G-Major with violist Roger Tapping. Recorded over the course of four years, the recordings document the group's intense engagement with Brahms' musical world.
The Chiara Quartet performs in major concert halls across the country, including Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington DC, and Harris Hall at the Aspen Music Festival. The ensemble also devotes a portion of its performance season to concerts in non-classical venues including (le) Poisson Rouge and Galapagos Art Space in New York, The Tractor Tavern in Seattle, Avant Garden in Houston, and the Hideout in Chicago, among many others. Recent highlights of the Chiara Quartet's international performances include the American Academy in Rome, a critically-acclaimed eight-city tour of Sweden with clarinetist Håkan Rosengren, and a performance of Steve Reich's Different Trains in Munich at the storied Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.
The Chiara discography includes the Mozart and Brahms clarinet quintets with Håkan Rosengren for SMS Classical, and the world premiere recordings of Robert Sirota's Triptych and Gabriela Lena Frank's Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout for the Quartet's own New Voice Singles label. The Chiara is also featured on Nadia Sirota's debut recording for New Amsterdam Records, first things first, which was included on "Best of" lists in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, and many more. Other recent collaborators of the quartet include Joel Krosnick, Todd Palmer, Simone Dinnerstein, Norman Fischer, and Paul Katz, as well as members of the Orion, Ying, Cavani, and Pacifica Quartets.
The Chiara Quartet has been artists-in-residence at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln since 2005. In the summer, they are in residence at Greenwood Music Camp as well as the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Chamber Music Institute. The Chiara trained and taught at The Juilliard School, mentoring for two years with the Juilliard Quartet, as recipients of the Lisa Arnhold Quartet Residency from 2003-2005.
Chiara (key-ARE-uh) is an Italian word, meaning “clear, pure, or light.” More information about the Chiara Quartet can be found online at www.chiaraquartet.net, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/chiarastringquartet.
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