Viano Quartet & Nina Bernat

Now in its 17th year, CMNW’s Protégé Project has helped launch the careers of a new generation of world-renowned musicians and composers, and tonight is a celebration of their stellar rise! Acclaimed bassist Nina Bernat (2024) joins the dynamic Viano Quartet (2022)–all five alumni now winners of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant–for an evening of quartets and quintets. Their program will feature two CMNW-commissioned works written especially for them by Protégé Alumni Composers Alistair Coleman (2022) and Kian Ravaei (2023), as well as Dvořák’s thrilling “American” String Quintet with the added power and depth of Bernat’s double bass.

First Baptist Church
Saturday, 3/6 • 8:00 pm

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Program

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

KIAN RAVAEI “The Little Things” for String Quartet (2023)

KIAN RAVAEI (b. 1999)
The Little Things (2023)
CMNW Co-Commission - World Premiere

1. I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose
2. High From the Earth I Heard a Bird
3. Two Butterflies Went Out at Noon
4. A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
5. The Moon Was but a Chin of Gold
6. A Spider Sewed at Night
7. If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking

All seven titles which comprise The Little Things come from Emily Dickinson, who never fails to direct our attention toward nature’s easily overlooked wonders. Movements II, III, IV, and VI evoke various animal life, while I and V portray the sun and moon respectively. The order of the movements suggests the cyclic journey of all living things from morning to night to a new morning.

In the final movement, we hear the voice of Nature singing Dickinson’s famous lines:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

ALISTAIR COLEMAN (b. 1998) “Ghost Art Canticles” for String Quartet & Double Bass (2025)

ALISTAIR COLEMAN (b. 1998)
Ghost Art Canticles for String Quartet & Double Bass (2025)

I. Sunburst
II. Evensong
III. Perpetua

WORLD PREMIERE | CMNW COMMISSION

Ghost Art Canticles, composed for String Quartet and Double Bass, is inspired by Austin, the final work of American artist Ellsworth Kelly. The only building Kelly ever designed, Austin takes the form of a chapel with vibrant stained-glass windows, a cross-shaped layout, 12 abstract panels evocative of the Stations of the Cross, and other religious allusions. However, Kelly conceived Austin as a “secular chapel,” stripping away sacred function to create “a place of calm and light.” It embodies what The New Yorker describes as Kelly’s lifelong pursuit of Ghost Art: “a translation from reality into something fully real, itself, only different.”

Growing up singing in a local church choir, one of my earliest memories was hearing Bach’s organ music fill the church with a roar of sound. Writing a new piece for Chamber Music Northwest’s festival celebrating Bach made me reflect on how deeply his music, like mine, was influenced by the church. While Bach primarily wrote for liturgical settings, his music is now performed in concert halls, allowing performers and listeners to draw new, secular meanings. I see a parallel in Kelly’s Austin—a space where traces of religious symbols remain, but their purpose has shifted. Ghost Art Canticles imagines music inhabiting this in-between space, drawing from both Kelly and Bach, where spiritual symbols become afterimages—ghosts of their former selves—that inspire new meanings.

The first movement, Sunburst, begins with a simple idea that gradually expands through canons, echoing Bach’s contrapuntal techniques and shifting light patterns in Austin. The second movement, Evensong, is a chorale, a direct nod to Bach’s meditative works. The final movement, Perpetua, spins out in relentless motion, evoking the restless play of color and light within the chapel. This title refers to both moto perpetuo (perpetual motion) and lux perpetua, an “everlasting light” in sacred texts—an idea that reflects Bach’s timeless influence on my music and others.

Ghost Art Canticles was commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest with generous support from Ravi Vedanayagam & Ursula Luckert. The piece is written for, and dedicated to, Nina Bernat and the Viano Quartet.

—© Alistair Coleman

ANTONIN DVOŘÁK String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 (“American”)

ANTONIN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904) String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 (“American”) (26’)

I. Allegro ma non troppo
II. Lento
III. Molto Vivace
IV. Finale: vivace ma non troppo

All fans of Dvořák’s “American” music owe a debt of gratitude to Josef Kovařík. If Dvořák had not met and befriended the young Czech-American violinist, he would not have written the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, or the String Quintet, Op. 97 (both nicknamed “American”), nor would the summer of 1893, when Dvořák and his family spent the summer in a small town in northeastern Iowa, prove to be one of the most significant periods in the composer’s life.

Kovařík grew up in Spillville, Iowa, a small farming community settled by Czech and German immigrants, and he served as Dvořák’s personal assistant from 1892–95, while Dvořák headed the National Conservatory in New York City. Understanding Dvořák’s dislike of city life and his need for the slower pace and quiet of the countryside, Kovařík invited the composer and his family to leave behind the hustle and bustle of New York City and live in Spillville during the summer of 1893.

Spillville clearly agreed with Dvořák; within three days of his arrival, he began work on Op. 96. Dvořák wrote quickly, as was his wont, and finished the quartet two weeks later. Eager to hear his new work, Dvořák performed the first violin part, with members of the Kovařík family playing the other instruments, in the first performance in the music room of the Spillville school.

“When I wrote this quartet in the Czech community of Spillville in 1893, I wanted to write something for once that was very
melodious and straightforward,” Dvořák later wrote. “Dear Papa Haydn kept appearing before my eyes, and that is why it all turned out so simply. And it’s good that it did.” In keeping with his focus on clear themes and ideas, Dvořák crafted many of the melodies from pentatonic scales, with basic, understated harmonic accompaniments.

Violists feel a particular kinship with Dvořák, himself an accomplished player. In Dvořák’s music, particularly his chamber works, the viola often takes center stage. Many of the “American” Quartet’s themes are first played by the viola, like the opening melody of the Allegro non troppo.

The unadorned melodies and ready accessibility of Op. 96 appealed to audiences from its first public performance by the Kneisel Quartet in Boston on New Year’s Day, 1894, and are part of the reason Op. 96 remains one of Dvořák’s most popular chamber works.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

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