Celebrity Series of Boston
Gary Dunning, President and Executive Director
Presents
Calder Quartet
Friday, February 20, 2015, 8pm — NEC’s Jordan Hall
(Boston) Celebrity Series of Boston will present Calder Quartet on Friday, February 20, 2015 at 8pm at NEC’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA. An Aaron Richmond Recital. This performance is sponsored by the D.L. Saunders Real Estate & Hotel Investors Group, AMO. Media partner is 99.5 WCRB.
Tickets start at $30, and are available online at www.celebrityseries.org, by calling CelebrityCharge at (617) 482-6661 Monday-Friday 10a.m.- 4 p.m., or at the Jordan Hall Box Office, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston.
This performance marks Calder Quartet’s Celebrity Series debut.
The Calder Quartet performs a broad range of repertoire and is the winner of the 2014 Avery Fisher Career Grant. They are known for the discovery, commissioning, recording and mentoring of some of today’s best emerging composers (over 25 commissioned works to date). The group continues to work and collaborate with artists across musical genres, spanning the ranges of classical and contemporary music, as well as rock, and visual arts. Inspired by innovative American artist Alexander Calder, the Calder Quartet brings context to the works they perform in an artfully crafted musical experience.
The 2013-14 season included debuts for the Calder Quartet at New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, and London’s Wigmore Hall. The group premiered a new work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang with Los Angeles Master Chorale. The group produced recordings including the Mozart Piano Concertos K. 414, 415, 449 arranged for string quartet, bass and piano with pianist Anne Marie McDermott, the Grammy-nominated The Edge of Light featuring Messaien and Saariaho with pianist Gloria Cheng, and the Emmy-Award winning title theme to Da Vinci’s Demons by Bear McCreary. In the spring of 2013, the quartet performed Terry Riley’s The Sands with the Cleveland Orchestra. They also teamed with pianist Anne-Marie McDermott to record Mozart concertos for Bridge Records.
Other recent highlights include a premiere of a new clarinet quintet by Aaron Jay Kernis at La Jolla Music Society SummerFest; and performances at the Laguna Beach Festival alongside Joshua Bell and Edgar Meyer, and at Stanford Lively Arts and Le Poisson Rouge (NYC) with Grammy-winning pianist Gloria Cheng. The quartet debuted at the Edinburgh International Festival (broadcast on BBC-3), and made its Austrian debut at the Esterhazy Palace. They have performed at halls and festivals across the globe including Carnegie Hall, Washington Performing Arts Society, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Cleveland Museum of Art, Melbourne Festival, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, New Haven’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and Hollywood Bowl. The Calder Quartet has toured across North America with So Percussion, and with rockers Andrew W.K. and The Airborne Toxic Event. The quartet has been featured on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic, the Late Show with David Letterman, the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Late Night with Jimmy Kimmel, and the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
The group has long-standing relationships with composers Terry Riley, Christopher Rouse and Thomas Adès. The Calder Quartet first met Riley when they shared a concert as part of the L.A. Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox Festival in 2006. They subsequently released a limited edition vinyl release of Riley’s Trio and Quartet in commemoration of the composers’ 75th birthday. The Calder is the first quartet in two decades to have a work written for them by composer Christopher Rouse. An album of works by Rouse, called Transfiguration, was released in 2010. After featuring the music of Thomas Adès on their first recording in 2008 (along with Mozart and Ravel), the group worked directly with the composer on a performance of Arcadiana as part of the Green Umbrella Series at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
In 2011 the Calder Quartet launched a non-profit dedicated to furthering its efforts in commissioning, presenting, recording, and education. The non-profit has co-commissioned works with the Getty Museum, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, and the Barbican Centre; funded the recording of 12 string quartets commissioned for the Calder Quartet by emerging composers; and made possible visits to Inner City Arts and Chinatown’s Castelar Elementary as part of LA’s Best.
The Calder Quartet formed at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and continued studies at the Colburn Conservatory of Music with Ronald Leonard, and at the Juilliard School, where it received the Artist Diploma in Chamber Music Studies as the Juilliard Graduate Resident String Quartet. The quartet regularly conducts master classes and has been featured at the Colburn School (where the quartet was in residence for three years), the Juilliard School, Cleveland Institute of Music, University of Cincinnati College Conservatory and USC Thornton School of Music.
Program:
ANDREW NORMAN: Sabina
RAVEL: String Quartet in F Major
THOMAS ADÈS: Arcadiana
BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Opus 95, “Serioso”
About Celebrity Series of Boston
Celebrity Series of Boston was founded in 1938 by pianist and impresario Aaron Richmond. Over the course of its 76-year history, Celebrity Series has presented an array of the world’s greatest performing artists, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arturo Toscanini, Ignace Paderewski, Artur Rubenstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Andrés Segovia, Kirsten Flagstad, Marian Anderson, Luciano Pavarotti, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, Ballet Russe De Monte Carlo, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the New York City Opera Company.
The Celebrity Series of Boston believes in the power of excellence and innovation in the performing arts to enrich life experiences, transform lives and build better communities. Through its education initiatives, the Celebrity Series seeks to build a community of Greater Boston where the performing arts are a valued, lifelong, shared experience–on stages, in schools, at home– everywhere. For more information on Celebrity Series of Boston, call (617) 482-2595 or visit us online at www.celebrityseries.org.
The Celebrity Series of Boston, Inc. receives generous support from Amy & Joshua Boger; Donna & Mike Egan; Gabor Garai & Susan Pravda; David & Harriet Griesinger; Paul L. King; The Royal Little Family Foundation; Susanne Marcus Collins Foundation; Eleanor & Frank Pao; The John S. and Cynthia Reed Foundation; Sanjay & Sangeeta Verma; Nancy Richmond Winsten; Charlesbank Capital Partners LLC; First Republic Bank; Foley & Lardner; Massachusetts Cultural Council; The Peabody Foundation; PTC; Tufts Health Plan; The D.L. Saunders Real Estate & Hotel Investment Group, AMO; Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
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