Dover Quartet  |  Duo: the Afield  |  Prima Trio  |  Telegraph Quartet  |  Robert Dick

Dover Quartet

This program Joy, Escape, Outlet, Gift explores the most important
functions of music: its ability to transport us, its offer of pure enjoyment, and its capacity to say what words by themselves cannot. Mendelssohn’s music is simply why we love music: the sheer delight we discover in its beauty and emotional richness. Conversely, Simon Laks and Viktor Ullmann were both victims of concentration camps. Laks wrote his third quartet after the liberation of the concentration camps (he spent most of his time in Auschwitz). This music, based on his native Polish themes, transported him to the past and created vivid memories of life before the war. Ullmann wrote his Quartet No. 3 while imprisoned in Terezin, and used music as an escape from his reality. The incredible ending of the quartet is one of triumph and hope. He wrote music which transported him to another world. Finally, one of the most wonderful examples of music’s ability to speak to us more deeply than words, Schumann’s Quartet No. 2—part of a birthday gift to his beloved wife Clara,—is a declaration of love and the deepest intimate feelings, which are so much more descriptive through the music. This program allows us to examine the crucial importance of music in every aspect of our lives.

The Dover Quartet has been called the “young American string quartet of the moment.” They’ve won nearly every major chamber music competition, and in 2013, they swept every prize in Banff. That international competition win assured their practically meteoric rise to the top of the international music scene. But as Joel points out, playing in a quartet is a balancing act. There’s no conductor. It’s all democratic — meaning the four members make every decision: e.g. balance, tempo, style, timbre — and maybe most importantly — what is the most important thing to be heard in the moment. As the Chicago Tribune put it, “The Dover Quartet players have it in them to become the next Guarneri String Quartet – they’re that good.”

Duo: The Afield

Concert Program: Time Pieces grew out of new works for solo violin, commissioned by Hawley for Fischer on the occasion of her 40th birthday. The composers are Nico Muhly, Augusta Reed Thomas, Paola Prestini, Lisa Bielawa, Pierre Jalbert, Rodney Lister, Byron Au Yong. Followed by Short Selections from Bach.

Rebecca Fischer, with the Chiara Quartet, has won top prizes in the Fischoff National Chamber Music competition, the Paolo Borciani Competition in Italy, the Astral Artistic Services audition, and was awarded the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. Praised for her “beautiful tone and nuanced phrasing in the Boston Musical Intelligencer, she has recorded for Azica Records and New Amsterdam Records. Fischer holds degrees from Columbia University and The Juilliard School. A passionate educator, Rebecca Fischer is a Research Associate Professor and Hixson-Lied Artist-in-Residence at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and summer faculty at Greenwood Music Camp in western Massachusetts. As of September 2017, The Chiara Quartet ended its performances together in order to pursue individual careers. Fischer will continue her performance life
with Duo: The Afield.

Anthony Hawley is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who has won residencies and awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, VCCA, and Arte Studio Ginistrelle, among others. He has exhibited and performed solo projects in venues such as Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, MO; The Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, Nebraska; and Arte Studio Ginistrelle, Assisi, Italy. His most recent solo exhibition “Fault Diagnosis”—a five-day multimedia event centering around a 1985 Nissan Pulsar NX—was produced by CounterCurrent in partnership with the Menil Collection and Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas. He writings include two collections of poetry, as well as essays and poems in various publications including The Brooklyn Rail, The Paris Review, and Verse. He studied at Columbia University (BA) and School of Visual Arts (MFA).

Prima Trio

The Prima Trio was founded in 2004 while its members were studying at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. The Trio triumphed at the 2007 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, winning the coveted Grand Prize (out of no fewer than 137 entries from across the country and around the world) as well as the Gold Medal in the Senior Division. In addition, the Prima Trio was awarded a Midwest Winner’s Tour and a European debut at Italy’s Emilia Romagna Festival, as well as a total of $10,500 in prize money. The final round and grand-prize winner’s concerts were held at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Boris Allakhverdyan is the Los Angeles Philharmonic principal
clarinetist. Prior to this, he was Principal Clarinet of the Metropolitan
Opera Orchestra. He was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, of Armenian
descent. Violinist Gulia Gurevich was born to one of Uzbekistan’s most distinguished musical families. Gurevich made her solo debut with the Uzbekistan National Symphony Orchestra at the age of fourteen and her conducting debut at the age of 15. Gulia moved to the USA as a teenager to study at the Interlochen Arts Academy. Russian pianist Anastasia Derik, born in St. Petersburg, is a founder and Artistic Director of the “Russian Heritage” Piano Competition for young pianists. She has been the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including the Governor of Saint Petersburg Award for achievements in the arts, Harold and Helene Schonberg Piano Scholarship, and Susan W. Rose Fellowship at The Juilliard School.

Telegraph Quartet

The Telegraph formed in 2013 and won the 2016 Naumburg Chamber Music Award the next year. The prize, one of the most prestigious in the world of chamber music, goes to soloists and ensembles on a rotating basis. The Naumburg helped launch the careers of such groups as the Pacifica, Brentano and Emerson string quartets and the Eroica Trio—both the Pacifica and the Brentano have performed here at the North Dakota Museum of Art. The prize carries with it a performance at Carnegie Hall and a commissioned work by esteemed American composer Robert Sirota (on today’s program).

The same year they won the Grand Prize and Gold Medal at the
Fischoff Chamber Music Competition. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2017 as “…an incredibly valuable addition to the cultural landscape” and “powerfully adept… with a combination of brilliance and subtlety,” the Quartet has since gone on to perform in concert halls, music festivals, and academic institutions from Los Angeles and New York to Italy and Taiwan. In 2016, the Quartet was invited as one of a handful of emerging professional string quartets
from around the world to perform in Paris, France at the Biennale de
quatuors à cordes, a showcase for major concert presenters of Europe and Asia taking place at the Philharmonie de Paris.

The group ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a debut
recording of quartets by Britten, Webern and Leon Kirchner.

Robert Dick

As a boy starting to play the flute in the late 1950s, I used to imagine
my flute as a spaceship. After all, it had all the cool looking keys and rods and strangely shaped metal pieces that the spaceships in my Science Fiction magazines did. The flute stand became a landing module (a decade before the Eagle landed on the moon!) and the trill keys were rotational thrusters.

But my flute had something going that no spaceship can do—it traveled through time as well as space! And now, these decades later, I’m still in the cockpit, heading out on yet another journey, fueled by a lifetime of inspiration from music and all else I’ve experienced on planet Earth.

Today’s program takes us all the way back to the 1700s with a Fantasia by Telemann, through to the 19th century heavy metal of Paganini, bounces between clouds of futuristic sounds and traditional Japanese phrases, and ends—where else?—in the future with my ever-changing version of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.

I’m thrilled to be playing for you at the North Dakota Museum of Art
and it’s my privilege to be your guide (no tipping, please!), opening the way to easily hear these wonders by introducing the pieces and talking about what happens and why, and how the music connects to us all.

Robert Dick is a musical visionary, a creative virtuoso in the tradition of Paganini and Hendrix, artists who redefined both the music and the technique of their instruments. Improvisor, composer, author, teacher and inventor, he performs worldwide. Listening to Dick play solo has been likened to the experience of hearing a full orchestra.

A central focus of my music is the idea that acoustic instruments can be treated as human-powered synthesizers, each capable of an
enormous range of sonority and expression well beyond their traditional definitions. I have total faith in the ability of humans to transcend limits imposed by presupposition. As a child, I rejected the idea that the flute could only produce one note at a time and by my late teens had started to invent thousands of new sonorities. They were there for the doing, if one assumed they could exist, instead of couldn’t.

The idea of continuous transformation of timbre is very important to
me, and my music is influenced by electric and electronic music, world music, natural sounds and the work of my fellow composer-performers. I try never to make pastiches but to fuse influences and create work that’s truly original.

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