Calidore String Quartet

“Synergistic brilliance and ferocious commitment.”

Sunday, July 14th at 3 pm
Ventura College Performing Arts Center
4700 Loma Vista Road, Ventura

This concert is dedicated to Dr. Burns Taft
Ventura Music Festival Artistic Director Emeritus

Jeffrey Myers         | violin
Ryan Meehan         | violin
Jeremy Berry          | viola
Estelle Choi           | cello

Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127 | Ludwig van Beethoven
                Maestoso; Allegro
                Adagio, ma non troppo e molto cantabile
                Scherzando vivace
                Finale: Allegro

Three Essays | Caroline Shaw

First Essay: Nimrod (2016)

Second Essay: Echo (2018)

Third Essay: Ruby (2018)

~ Intermission ~

Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 | Felix Mendelssohn
                Allegro vivace assai
                Allegro assai
                Adagio
                Finale: Allegro molto

Formed in 2010 at the Colburn School of Music, Calidore String Quartet has won the decade’s most prestigious honors for chamber music, including the M-Prize, and accolades for performances at top global venues (Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BBC Proms and Berlin Konzerthaus) as one of the finest chamber music ensembles performing today. Cali (“California”) “doré” (French for “golden”) albums include Resilience; Haydn and Mendelssohn; Russian Reflections; and Serenade. Presented by Opus 3 Artists.

For his twelfth string quartet Opus 127 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) leaves behind his middle period heroics for a late style that quests for the wholeness of vision and sacred order he was reading about in Hindu philosophy—“a spiraling inwards” away from drama and struggle and into acceptance, tenderness and clarity. After opening with a triumphal echo of the Eroica Symphony it modulates towards a meditative serenity. Next comes a set of extraordinary variations or transformations that evoke lift, wonder and playful games of “leapfrog between the violins”—a mood intensified with the Scherzo’s contrapuntal gallops, grace steps and stomps. The Finale is a fast and curious downhill race to a “trilling” dissolution, an all-inclusive vision of profound love.

Pulitzer Prize-winning American violinist, singer, and composer Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) wrote her eighth string quartet Nimrod for Calidore at first in “calm and optimism” but finished during the turmoil of the 2016 Presidential election. The slow second essay references the Echo chamber that social media fosters in our political discourse and the third title refers both to gem stone and the programming language Ruby developed in Japan in the mid-1990s.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) composed Opus 80 in the wake of his beloved sister Fanny’s untimely death shortly before his own. The grief, anxiety and defiance of the first two movements gives way to a sense of melancholy, nostalgia and tenderness in the third but no sense of consolation for the finale—only trembling, disquiet and fist-shaking anger.

 Sponsors:  Jordan Laby
                 Cannon Family Foundation