The Calidore String Quartet, the University of Delaware’s Distinguished String Quartet in Residence, presents a program of contemporary chamber music on November 9 in Newark.
All three of the composers represented on the program - Caroline Shaw, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Samuel Adams - have connections to the quartet that go beyond the notes on the page, says violinist Ryan Meehan.
“The cool thing about it is they are all friends of ours and artists that we formed a relationship with over the past 16 years,” he says.
The Calidore String Quartet has been performing together around the world since 2010, in addition to recording more than a dozen records and maintaining a busy teaching schedule. A chance meeting at Stony Brook University in New York with Dennis Assanis, then provost and later president of the University of Delaware, led to the quartet’s appointment as Distinguished String Quartet in Residence. In that role the four musicians teach individual students and chamber ensembles and present regular performances like Monday’s concert.
While the performance centers living 21st century composers, Meehan says audiences unfamiliar with or leery of contemporary music could find this concert to be a good, listener-friendly introduction to the world of modern classical music.
“One thing that all of these works share in common is that they have a lot of accessible traits throughout,” he explains.
Two of the works, Shaw’s “Blueprint” and Turnage’s “Arietta” also take inspiration from Beethoven, a composer important to Calidore, which in recent years has recorded the composer’s string quartets.
The quartet performs on Monday, November 9 at 5:30 at Gore Recital Hall in the Roselle Center for the Arts at the University of Delaware.
Delaware Public Media's arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
