arnica quartet tickets now on sale

The Arnica Quartet is presenting their second concert of the season in Portland on Friday, March 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Community Music Center. The concert is part of the month-long March Music Moderne festival curated by Bob Priest. The concert features music by some of the greatest composers from the 17th – 21st centuries. Tickets are $10 students/seniors and $20 general admission. You can purchase tickets up to the morning of the concert at brownpapertickets.com. We hope to see you there – last year’s concert was a sellout!

The 17th century is represented by Britain’s first great composer, Henry Purcell (1659-1695). The quartet will be performing several of his Fantasias for four viols arranged for string quartet by yours truly. They are lovely, and sometimes strikingly original works that bridge the gap between Renaissance polyphony and the Baroque quite seamlessly.

The 18th-19th centuries are represented by Ludwig van Beethoven, with his last complete quartet, the Op. 135 in F major. Just as Purcell neatly bridged the gap between broad musical periods, so too did Beethoven, bringing Classicism to its zenith and moving then beyond Classicism to the early stirrings of the Romantic movement. His last quartet, however, pulls back from the sprawling and experimental forms of his earlier late period quartets, and takes a very Classical viewpoint, much as his Op. 95 ‘Serioso’ quartet took the larger forms of his middle quartets and distilled them into concise, highly organized forms.

The 20th century is represented by the next great English composer after (long after!) Henry Purcell, Benjamin Britten. His early String Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 25 has all of the hallmarks of classic Britten – angularly rhythmic melodic lines, extremes of registration, and highly logical forms – all in a compact package that still manages to feel fresh and new even today.

The 21st century brings us the wonderful Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, with his piece Tenebrae, whose material also forms the basis for his wonderful and massive work for cello and orchestra, Azul. Golijov describes the genesis of Tenebrae:

“I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar”, the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground.”