Catalysts for the Future! Benefit Concert

Join us to support CMNW’s Vital Music Education & Community Engagement Programs!

The time is now to spark joy and hope! Join us for CMNW’s annual benefit event, returning this year to The REDD on Salmon in Portland. Celebrate incredible music as the Grammy Award-winning Catalyst Quartet takes the stage, performing an impressive repertoire including featured pieces from local composers. Plus, hear from Catalyst about their work in our community as CMNW education artists-in-residence.

This year’s benefit event features the world-class, Grammy Award-winning Catalyst Quartet performing an impressive repertoire—including “CQ Minute” shorts by legendary local composers Caroline Shaw and Andy Akiho, along with Paquito D’Rivera, plus Haydn’s Sunrise Quartet and Piazzolla’s mesmerizing Angel Suite — and joining them on stage will be BRAVO Youth Orchestra‘s Ambassador Quartet! For even more fun, our friends at Kennedy Violins will be offering an Instrument Petting Zoo for hands-on interaction.

In these times of uncertainty, we remain dedicated to our mission to use the transformative power of music to enrich the lives of our diverse and growing community—especially those in underserved areas. All proceeds from this event help fund our FREE Education & Community Engagement programs, including the Young Artist Institute, masterclasses, community concerts, school performances, and more. These programs served more than 6,300 people last year, and our reach and impact continue to expand. We invite you to join us as “Catalysts for the Future,” helping to ignite a lasting passion for the arts in young musicians and music lovers.

The concert program includes a paddle raise to support CMNW’s many free education and community engagement programs.

TICKET OPTIONS:

Catalysts for the Future: $150 per person ($75 tax-deductible contribution)
Reception: 5:30pm
Concert: 7pm
Includes a pre-concert reception with buffet dinner and drinks, plus early seating for the concert and inclusion in the post-concert dessert social.

Concert-Only Access: $75 (limited number, not tax deductible)
Doors Open: 6:30pm
Concert: 7pm
Includes admission to the concert and post-concert dessert social only.

Proceeds from this event benefit Chamber Music Northwest’s Education and Community Engagement programs.

NOTES:
Full evening ticket sales close on Friday, April 18 at 3pm. Please contact, at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to find out if tickets are still available after that date.

Concert & Dessert Social tickets will be available online through 3pm on Tuesday, April 22.

Gold Sponsor

Karen & Cliff Deveney

Silver Sponsors

Bronze Sponsors

Ronnie-Gail Emden & Andrew Wilson

The Redd on Salmon Street
Thursday, 4/24 • 5:30 pm

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Program

Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.

SUSAN H. DAY “Tango Mysterioso”

SUSAN H. DAY Tango Mysterioso

HAYDN String Quartet in B-flat Major, Hob. III:78, Op. 76, No. 4 (“Sunrise”)

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

22’

The name for Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4 (“Sunrise”), stems from the first violin’s brilliant daybreak theme, which emerges from an earthy chord at the start. The day then begins with nearly Baroque runs, until the daybreak theme returns in the cello. The second movement Adagio draws from the first movement’s stillness, hesitating to build beyond its simple beginnings until the first violin begins to test the waters with triplet arpeggios. The contemplative close recalls the triplet rhythm, but only as it fades to silence.

The minuet emerges slowly from the Adagio’s stillness, as the first violin’s half-step repetitions leave the melody wavering before it can quite move forward. The final Allegro ma non troppo builds from the top down, as melodies begin in the upper parts and move progressively lower. After a transition to the minor, the tempo builds momentum and a powerful unison welcomes the final cadence.

From Haydn to Beethoven: Passing the Torch Notes:

October 29, 1792

Dear Beethoven,

In leaving for Vienna today, you are about to realize a long-cherished desire. The wandering genius of Mozart still grieves for his passing. With Haydn’s unquenchable spirit, it has found shelter but no home and longs to find some lasting habitation. Work hard, and the spirit of Mozart’s genius will come to you from Haydn’s hands.

Your friend always,

      Waldstein

These words of encouragement, written by young Beethoven’s patron in his home town of Bonn, were to become prophetic. Ludwig van Beethoven, partly through study with Haydn but mostly through self-study and self-searching, would inherit the mantle of the High Classic Viennese School. At the same time, he would also go on to become the most individualistic composer the world had yet known. Within nine years after Waldstein’s well-wishes, Beethoven had already made his mark on Vienna by composing music not just in the Haydn/Mozart tradition, but music that also displayed his own bold personality and tendency toward innovation.

In 1790, when Joseph Haydn had been on his way to England for the first time, he stopped in Bonn and was shown a cantata by young Beethoven. The master agreed to take him as a pupil whenever both of them would be in Vienna.

Before the end of 1792, young Beethoven was established in the Austrian cultural capital, and Haydn had returned. Beethoven became Haydn’s student, not in composition per se, but in the rudiments of counterpoint. (That craft was the only instruction student composers ever received at that time.) Haydn was not an especially good teacher, and Beethoven was far from an exemplary follower of rules. However, they had mutual respect for one another, and Haydn even wrote humorously to a friend that if the student Beethoven continued developing as he had done so far, Haydn the master would “soon be obliged to quit composing.” Beethoven’s biographer Alexander Thayer asserts that Beethoven “would, at all events, thoroughly know and understand the regular that he might with confidence judge for himself how far to indulge in the irregular.” Beethoven’s studies with Haydn came to an end around the beginning of January 1794, for Haydn left for his second English tour later that month.

We now fast-forward three or four years. While at work on The Creation in 1797, Joseph Haydn was also devoting time to the completion of six string quartets. This cycle would be published two years later as Opus 76. The set bears a dedication to Count Joseph Erdödy, one of the Hungarian nobles Haydn had come to know during his years in the Esterházy household. These works are generally considered a highpoint in Haydn’s development of the string quartet. They also contain certain individual movements that are among the most famous in all of Haydn’s works; for example, the second movement of No. 3 (“Emperor”) is a set of variations on the Austrian National Anthem, which Haydn himself had composed.

By 1799, when Haydn wrote the two quartets published as Op. 77, a genuine rivalry had developed between the two composers. Up to that point, Beethoven – younger by about 38 years – had avoided public comparison with Haydn by pointedly avoiding the genres that had made the senior composer famous: chiefly, quartets and symphonies. Beethoven had concentrated instead on other chamber combinations, such as his piano trios and the famous Septet, Op. 20. Then, in 1800, he stepped boldly into the string quartet arena with his six Quartets, Op. 18. The Viennese intelligentsia was astonished. One listener even described them as “the greatest of their kind.”

Haydn’s quartets of Opus 77 were originally commissioned to be six in number. Why then, did he stop at two, never to bring another to completion? Was the celebrated composer of The Creation now too shy to be compared with Beethoven, the upstart darling of Vienna? Apparently, that may have been the case, as had happened after Mozart made a splash in Vienna with his piano concertos and operas. Haydn then had avoided those genres. Now a young string- quartet rival loomed, and the aging Haydn simply backed off. Haydn biographer H.C. Robbins Landon puts it this way: “Perhaps we must judge the non-composition of the intended Op. 77, Nos. 3-6, in this light; that is, of Haydn quietly withdrawing from the stage, leaving it to Beethoven and his Op. 18.”

In Haydn’s late works, we can hear a glimmer of the coming age of emotional Romanticism. Various movements of the Opp. 76 and 77 quartets provide us with a subtle variety of moods ranging from the melancholy to the dramatic, contrasted with cheerfully Classical endings and rumbling finishes. The intensity of certain passages shows Haydn’s debt to Beethoven at this time – point counterpoint, we might call it. Beethoven had formally received the torch – but for a while, both composers ran with it.

—Dr. Michael Fink

CAROLINE SHAW Bittersweet Synonym

CAROLINE SHAW “Bittersweet synonym”
(b. 1982)

To mark its 10th anniversary in 2024, the Catalyst Quartet commissioned 11 composers to write miniature string quartets for their CQ Minute. These are stand-alone compositions are also featured as 11 individually unique music videos comprising a new video album. Nine composers committed to the project; two additional composers were selected through a national competition focused on new and emerging talent. Caroline Shaw’s Bittersweet Synonym is a part of this project.

CQ Minute is a co-commission of Chamber Music Monterey Bay, the Chamber Music Detroit, Electric Earth Concerts, and Town Hall Seattle.

PAQUITO D’RIVERA But, Just a Minute?!

To mark its 10th anniversary in 2024, the Catalyst Quartet commissioned 11 composers to write miniature string quartets for their CQ Minute. These are stand-alone compositions are also featured as 11 individually unique music videos comprising a new video album. Nine composers committed to the project; two additional composers were selected through a national competition focused on new and emerging talent. Paquito D’Rivera’s aptly titled But, Just a Minute?!is a part of this project.

CQ Minute is a co-commission of Chamber Music Monterey Bay, the Chamber Music Detroit, Electric Earth Concerts, and Town Hall Seattle.

ANDY AKIHO Presidio

To mark its 10th anniversary in 2024, the Catalyst Quartet commissioned 11 composers to write miniature string quartets for their CQ Minute. These are stand-alone compositions are also featured as 11 individually unique music videos comprising a new video album. Nine composers committed to the project; two additional composers were selected through a national competition focused on new and emerging talent. Andy Akiho’s Presidio is a part of this project.

CQ Minute is a co-commission of Chamber Music Monterey Bay, the Chamber Music Detroit, Electric Earth Concerts, and Town Hall Seattle.

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA Angel Suite (arr. Catalyst Quartet)

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA Angel Suite (arr. Catalyst Quartet)

I. La Introducción del Ángel
II. La Milonga del Ángel
III. La Muerte del Ángel
IV. La Resurrección del Ángel

Today, the name Astor Piazzolla is practically synonymous with tango, but it wasn’t always that way. When the Argentine composer first came to prominence in the 1950s and 60s, many established tango figures viewed his music with revulsion—as did the legendary Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. They found his approach harsh, dissonant, and angular, the very aspects that make his music so innovative and beloved today.

Piazzolla composed his Angel Suite as incidental music for Alberto Rodríguez Muñoz’ play, El tango del Ángel (1962), which portrays a fantastical story of an angel trying to bring peace to a rough Buenos Aires neighborhood. He initially scored the suite for his own tango quintet, comprised of electric guitar, violin, piano, double bass, and an accordion-like instrument called the bandoneón. However, it has since been re-arranged for many instrumentations, including this string quartet version by the Catalyst Quartet. The suite’s four movements can be performed together or as excerpts.

In La Introducción del Ángel, Piazzolla sets the scene with a meditative walking bass line that gradually evolves into a cagey tango. Then, in La Milonga del Ángel, he explores the milonga, another Argentine dance that predates the tango, with intense, emotive verve, particularly in the violin solo. The energetic La Muerte del Ángel occurs at the play’s climax just as the angel is killed in a knife fight, a moment depicted musically by dramatic, violent-sounding slides. La Resurrección del Ángel offers a calm, solemn conclusion before settling into a hymn-like final cadence.

—© Ethan Allred

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