On Sunday, April 15, 2018 at 3pm, Amernet String Quartet will perform a concert of music by Beethoven, Hosokawa, and Tchaikovsky. The concert will be preceded by a 2:30pm pre-concert lecture given Dr. Paul Cienniwa. Tickets are $20 and are available at the door on the day of the concert. For more information on this event and Music at St. Paul’s 30th Anniversary Season, visit music.stpaulsdelray.org. St. Paul’s is handicapped accessible.
The program begins with Jeffrey L. Briggs arrangement of Beethoven’s Op. 28 “Pastorale” Piano Sonata. Briggs’ “New Beethoven Quartet” cycle reimagines the master’s 32 Piano Sonatas as works for string quartet. Briggs writes, “For the audience familiar with the Piano Sonatas, it’s an interesting and thrilling (if somewhat surreal) experience hearing classical music you know but have never actually experienced before — with the sustain and dynamic abilities of the stringed instruments, you’ll hear lines that were implied in the piano but never stated so clearly. Also musical structure is more readily revealed by differences in timbre among the players. If you’re unfamiliar the Piano Sonatas, you’re in for a unique cultural experience as you hear how Beethoven builds inevitability into every phrase. You’ll also get the thrill of watching a quartet put through the paces and blending together.”
Also on the program is Toshio Hosokawa’s 2017 Kalligraphie. This atmospheric work sits between Western avant-garde music and traditional Japanese culture. He writes of a notion of beauty that grows from transience: “We hear the individual notes and appreciate at the same time the process of how the notes are born and die: a sound landscape of continual ‘becoming’ that is animated in itself.” Concluding the concert is Tchaikovsky’s Second String Quartet in F Major, Op. 22, a work that the composer considered his best. At the premiere, composer Anton Rubinstein declared that the style was not chamber music and that he could not understand it!