Chesapeake Music will present the Catalyst Quartet in concert at The Ebenezer Theater in Easton, Maryland on November 23 at 2:00 pm. The Quartet members – Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette, violins, Paul Laraia, viola, and Karlos Rodriguez, cello – have crafted an extraordinary program – “Cinematic Refuge” – of works by classical music composers who are also well-known for their scores for the stage and screen. As violist Paul Laraia explained: “Each of us in the Quartet felt drawn to these works because they show how composers known for cinema translated that same intensity and color into chamber music. It’s a chance for audiences to experience the intimacy of a string quartet with the sweep and imagination of the silver screen.”
The Catalyst Quartet’s program will open with two short and immediately appealing works: John Adams’ 2007 Fellow Traveler and Max Richter’s 2004 On the Nature of Daylight. Fellow Traveler was written to celebrate the director and librettist Peter Sellar’s fiftieth birthday. The title of this highly frenetic composition alludes to Sellar’s and Adams’ collaboration on their 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic. The subject of that opera, J. Robert Oppenheimer – known as the “father of the atomic bomb” – was suspected by the FBI of being a “fellow traveler” – code words for a communist sympathizer. Bits of music from another Adams-Sellars opera collaboration, Nixon in China, pop up in Fellow Traveler as well.
Max Richter’s highly emotional and poignant On the Nature of Daylight comes from his 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, a political protest piece against the humanitarian crisis of the Iraq War. Employing minimalism and counterpoint, the music builds from the lower to the higher pitches, which Richter explained as creating “a sense of luminosity and brightness but made from the darkest possible materials.” The work gradually decreases in dynamics and energy before closing on a minor chord that leaves an unresolved and somber feeling.
The heart of the Catalyst Quartet’s program begins with Philip Glass’ 1985 String Quartet No. 3 (also known as the Mishima String Quartet). This piece reuses music Glass composed for the film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a movie that explored the life and death by suicide of a Japanese novelist. For his String Quartet No. 3, Glass repurposed the music scored for Yukio Mishima’s childhood “chapter.” The piece is loosely organized into six movements that in the film accompany non-sequential flashbacks of events in Mishima’s early life. The work is also typical of Glass’ use of a minimalist composition technique. Harmonized rhythmic motifs are repeated over long stretches – varied only by loud/soft or harsh/soothing dynamic differences – that often create a hypnotic, meditative effect. Interestingly, the work has not a hint of Japanese musical style, but there is something wistful and mournful, even childlike at times in the six movements, as is appropriate to the childhood flashbacks that they originally accompanied in the film.
Following the Glass is Bernard Hermann’s haunting and melodically appealing 1965 Echoes for String Quartet. Hermann is perhaps best remembered for his scores for several of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (Psycho most notably comes to mind). However, Hermann and Hitchcock had a serious falling out when Hitchcock rejected Hermann’s score for the film Tom Curtain. This almost certainly led Hermann to return to concert hall compositions, and Echoes followed shortly. However, this melancholic work, which seems to brood and conjure dark images, might easily itself have served as a film score. Indeed, Hermann described the work as “a series of nostalgic emotional remembrances,” and the music critic Neil Sinyard has attempted to catalog these “remembrances” in the Echoes score: “A sad waltz echoes the ‘Memory Waltz’ from Snows of Kilimanjaro; a habanera rhythm fleetingly recalls the music for James Stewart’s obsessed spying on Kim Novak in the art gallery scene in Vertigo; a macabre scherzo is like those ‘rides in hell’ at which Herrmann excelled in numerous films, just as the Allegro momentarily has something of the violence of Psycho.”
The Catalyst Quartet’s program concludes with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 1933 String Quartet No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 26. Korngold had trained in Austria as a classical composer, but the troubles leading up to World War II brought him to Hollywood where between 1934 and 1947 he would compose to great acclaim the scores to some 16 films. Korngold created his second string quartet the year before he emigrated to America, and yet in this energetic and lyrical work, Korngold fashioned a succession of diverse moods as if he were orchestrating scenes in a movie. The opening Allegro is vividly romantic with dense harmonies and is followed by a charming and light-hearted Intermezzo with amusing twists and turns. The third movement Larghetto is decidedly more melancholic and sorrowful, albeit still beautifully lyrical with sumptuous melodies. The Waltz Finale is a full-blown Viennese waltz reminiscent of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Emperor Waltz. This string quartet clearly reveals not only Korngold’s melodic and harmonic inventiveness, but also his propensity for cinematic flair, a talent that would bring him great fame in his Hollywood years.
Chesapeake Music offers a limited number of free tickets for students, educators, and Talbot County First Responders, as well as a “buy-one-get-one” option for first-time patrons of Chesapeake Music. General admission tickets are $50. Visit ChesapeakeMusic.org for tickets and more information.
Based in Easton, Maryland, and celebrating its 40th Anniversary Year, Chesapeake Music is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that brings renowned musicians to delight, engage, and surprise today’s audiences, and educate, inspire, and develop tomorrow’s. Learn more at ChesapeakeMusic.org.
