Celebrating the Emerson Quartet with David Shifrin
Hailed by Time Magazine as “America’s Greatest Quartet,” the nine-time Grammy Award-winning Emerson Quartet graces CMNW’s stage one last time in their farewell season. This not-to-be-missed evening features the full span of the Emerson’s signature musical mastery: a West Coast premiere by Sarah Kirkland Snider, a thrilling Bartók quartet from their first Grammy recording, and a momentous final collaboration with the equally lauded clarinetist David Shifrin, in Brahms’s last and perhaps greatest chamber ensemble work.
PRELUDE PERFORMANCE:
6:30pm | Young Artists Institute students with quartet performances on stage at Kaul Auditorium
PLEASE NOTE: This Thursday concert is at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium, and is not at The Reser.
Reed College, Kaul Auditorium
Thursday, 7/6 • 8:00 pm PT
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- SARAH KIRKLAND SNIDER “Drink the Wild Ayre” (2022)
SARAH KIRKLAND SNIDER Drink the Wild Ayre (2022)
Drink the Wild Ayre is my second string quartet. I wrote my first over twenty years ago while poring over recordings by the Emerson String Quartet. At that time, I was new to composition and bought every CD of theirs I could find, obsessively studying counterpoint and voice-leading via their recordings. Their performances became my benchmark for the masterpieces they recorded; their sounds became synonymous, in my mind, with the composer’s intent. For me, theirs was the definitive interpretation of all the great string quartets in history.
So, when the invitation to write this piece came in — the Emerson’s final commission, to be performed during this, their final season — I nearly fell off my chair. I am still awestruck and humbled to have written this piece for some of my earliest heroes.
The title is a playful nod to one of the most famous quotes by their transcendentalist namesake essayist/philosopher/poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, Drink the wild air’s salubrity.” An ayre is a song-like, lyrical piece. The title seemed an apt reference not only to the lilting, asymmetrical rhythms of the music’s melodic narrative but also to the questing spirit, sense of adventure, and full-hearted passion with which the Emerson has thrown itself into everything it has done for the past 47 years. Here’s to the singular magic of these artistic giants and the new adventures that await them.
— Sarah Kirkland Snider
- BÉLA BARTÓK String Quartet No. 2, Sz. 67 (1915-17)
BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)
String Quartet No.2, Sz. 67 (27’)I. Moderato
II. Allegro molto capriccioso
III. Lento“The question is, what are the ways in which peasant [folk] music is taken over and becomes transmuted into modern music?” asked Béla Bartók in 1920. He provided three answers: arrange existing folk melodies, or write original melodies using folk idioms. “There is yet a third way in which the influence of peasant music can be traced in a composer’s work,” Bartók continued. “Neither peasant melodies nor imitations of peasant melodies can be found in his music, but it is pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music.”
Bartók’s String Quartet No. 2, which he composed between 1915-17, as WWI raged across Europe, epitomizes the third solution. The war curtailed Bartók’s ethnomusicological field work, which he had pursued, along with his good friend and colleague, Zoltán Kodály, for the better part of the previous decade. Instead, Bartók organized the material he had already collected. The second string quartet, one of only two original works Bartók wrote during these years, reflects the synthesis of folk idioms into contemporary concert hall language. Each of its three movements feature concentrated distillations of the raw vibrancy Bartók found in folk music, transmuted into classical forms.
Kodály described the three movements as “1. A quiet life. 2. Joy. 3. Sorrow,” and continued, “What emerges from the successive movements is not a series of different moods, but the continual evolution of a single, coherent, spiritual process. The impression conveyed by the work as a whole, though it is from the musical point of view formally perfect, is that of a spontaneous experience.”
—© Elizabeth Schwartz
- BRAHMS Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 (37’)I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Andantino
IV. Con motoJohannes Brahms had retired from composing by the time he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, but was so inspired by his playing that he came out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. The resulting chamber music includes the Clarinet Trio, two Clarinet Sonatas, and the poignant Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115, all some of his final, most mature works. Written as they were in the twilight of Brahms’ life, these works have a reflective quality, highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory.
The Clarinet Quintet seems to straddle two opposing sides of a coin. The conspicuous lack of tonic in the violins’ opening gesture creates a momentary ambiguity between B minor and D major, an early herald of the duality that will outline the work’s affective trajectory. The three-note motive that the clarinet sings in the Adagio is the same that forms the pillars of the movement’s rhapsodic middle section. The third movement is similarly constructed on two contrasting sections — a melancholic scherzo in B minor between the pastoral spaciousness of the D major Andantino areas — both mosaicked with the same two motives. Even the fourth movement sources its opening material from the Andantino, but this time the turbulent B minor casts a shadow of malaise on the sunny repose that ended the third movement. The final variation’s collision with reprised music from the first movement signifies a sort of communion, a coming full circle that seems to acknowledge this material as the bookends of a unified story. The realization of this goal allows the piece to finally come to rest, but not before the final upset of the forte penultimate chord: Brahms’ harrowing last gasp right as the curtain falls.
—© Graeme Steele Johnson
Artists
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David Shifrin
Clarinet & Artistic Director Emeritus 1981–2020
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Clarinetist David Shifrin graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy in 1967 and the Curtis Institute in 1971. He made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra having won the Orchestra’s Student Competition in 1969. He went on to receive numerous prizes and awards worldwide, including the Geneva and Munich International Competitions, the Concert Artists Guild auditions, and both the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1987) and the Avery Fisher Prize (2000).
Shifrin received Yale University’s Cultural Leadership Citation in 2014 and is currently the Samuel S. Sanford Professor in the Practice of Clarinet at the Yale School of Music where he teaches a studio of graduate-level clarinetists and coaches chamber music ensembles. He is also the artistic director of Yale’s Oneppo Chamber Music Society and the Yale in New York concert series. Shifrin previously served on the faculties of the Juilliard School, the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the University of Hawaii.
Shifrin served as artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from 1992 to 2004 and Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon from 1981 to 2020. He has appeared as soloist with major orchestras in the United States and abroad and has served as Principal Clarinet with the Cleveland Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra (under Stokowski), the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Symphony Orchestras of New Haven, Honolulu, and Dallas. Shifrin also continues to broaden the clarinet repertoire by commissioning and championing more than 100 works of 20th and 21st century American composers. Shifrin’s recordings have consistently garnered praise and awards including three Grammy nominations and “Record of the Year” from Stereo Review.
Shifrin is represented by CM Artists in New York and performs on Backun clarinets and Légère reeds.
Upcoming Concerts & Events
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Emerson String Quartet
Ensemble
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Eugene Drucker, violin
Philip Setzer, violin
Lawrence Dutton, viola
Paul Watkins, celloThe Emerson String Quartet will have its final season of concerts in 2022-23, disbanding after more than four decades as one of the world’s premier chamber music ensembles. “With musicians like this,” wrote a reviewer for The Times (London), “there must be some hope for humanity.” The Quartet has made more than 30 acclaimed recordings, and has been honored with nine Grammy Awards (including two for Best Classical Album), three Gramophone Awards, the Avery Fisher Prize, and Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year” award. As part of their larger mission to keep the string quartet form alive and relevant, they have commissioned and premiered works from some of today’s most esteemed composers, and have partnered in performance with leading soloists such as Renée Fleming, Barbara Hannigan, Evgeny Kissin, Emanuel Ax, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yefim Bronfman, James Galway, Edgar Meyer, Menahem Pressler, Leon Fleisher, André Previn, and Isaac Stern, to name a few.
In its final season, the Quartet will give farewell performances across North America and Europe, including San Francisco’s Herbst Theater, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, Vienna’s Musikverein, Prague’s Rudolfinum, and London’s Southbank Centre for the completion of its acclaimed cycle of Shostakovich quartets, and more, before coming home to New York City for its final series there with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, in a trio of programs entitled Emerson Dimensions where the Quartet will perform some of its most storied repertoire. They will give several performances of André Previn’s Penelope with Renée Fleming and Uma Thurman, including at the Los Angeles Opera, and they will appear at Carnegie Hall with Evgeny Kissin to perform the Dvořák Quintet as part of a benefit concert for the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. The final performance as the Emerson String Quartet will take place in October 2023 in New York City, and will be filmed for a planned documentary by filmmaker Tristan Cook.
The Quartet’s extensive discography includes the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bartók, Webern, and Shostakovich, as well as multi-CD sets of the major works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Dvořák. In its final season, the Quartet will record Schoenberg’s Second Quartet with Barbara Hannigan for release in 2023, with the session’s video documented by Mathieu Amalric for a short film. Deutsche Grammophon will also reissue its box set of the Emerson String Quartet Complete Recordings on the label, with two new additions. In October 2020, the group released a recording of Schumann’s three string quartets for the Pentatone label. In the preceding year, the Quartet joined forces with Grammy-winning pianist Evgeny Kissin to release a collaborative album for Deutsche Grammophon, recorded live at a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert in 2018.
Formed in 1976 and based in New York City, the Emerson String Quartet was one of the first quartets whose violinists alternate in the first violin position. The Quartet, which takes its name from the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, balances busy performing careers with a commitment to teaching, and serves as Quartet-in-Residence at Stony Brook University. In 2013, cellist Paul Watkins—a distinguished soloist, award-wining conductor, and devoted chamber musician—joined the original members of the Quartet to form today’s group.
In the spring of 2016, the State University of New York awarded full-time Stony Brook faculty members Philip Setzer and Lawrence Dutton the status of Distinguished Professor, and conferred the title of Honorary Distinguished Professor on part-time faculty members Eugene Drucker and Paul Watkins. The Quartet’s members also hold Honorary Doctorates from Middlebury College, the College of Wooster, Bard College, and the University of Hartford. In January of 2015, the Quartet received the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award, Chamber Music America’s highest honor, in recognition of its significant and lasting contribution to the chamber music field.
The Emerson String Quartet enthusiastically endorses Thomastik strings.
Upcoming Concerts & Events