by Richard Newsham
Find out for yourself why the young Calidore String Quartet, from L.A.’s Colburn School of Music, has won the decade’s most prestigious honors for chamber music as it’s traversed the globe’s top venues, delighting audiences at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BBC Proms, Berlin Konzerthaus—and now the Ventura College Performing Arts Center on Sunday, July 14, at 3 p.m., as the ensemble concludes the first weekend of the Ventura Music Festival’s 25th season.
The two violinists, violist and cellist will engage listeners with Beethoven’s inward spiraling Opus 127, as the composer moved from struggle to a Hindu-inspired inner peace, complete with playful “leapfrog” games among the strings. Next comes the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Gen X-er composer Caroline Shaw whose Three Essays are inspired by Marilynne Robinson’s essential essays, The Givenness of Things, the “echo” chamber of today’s social media, and the elegant Japanese programming language Ruby. Calidore concludes with Mendelssohn’s final work, Opus 80, a poignant cry for and celebration of his beloved and recently-deceased sister Fanny.
The string quartet with its intimate, complex, interwoven fabric of sound “is an amazing way to converse musically with others,” says Shaw—a kind of music “that will be contemporary forever,” added Stravinsky—“a strange composite being” of four individuals who share communal decisions yet do things spontaneously, requiring the other players to respond in real time. It’s “a zone of magic” for every audience to witness–don’t miss “the Calidore experience!”
Richard Newsham is a Ventura Music Festival consultant
