Leos Janacek (1854-1928) was a Czech composer, folklorist, theorist, and teacher. Initially influenced by his contemporary Dvorak, he became inspired by Moravian, Slavic, and other Eastern European folk music to develop a new musical style. 

String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters” (1928)

     Andante—Con moto—Allegro

     Adagio — Vivace

     Moderato — Andante — Adagio

     Allegro -  Andante — Adagio

String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters” (1928) commemorates the married Janacek's passionate, and unrequited, obsession with the much younger and happily married Kamila Strosslova. Despite her lack of interest in his music and her infrequent responses to his more than 600 letters written over a period of just over 10 years, Strosslova was the source of prolific compositional inspiration in his later life. Throughout the work Strosslova is represented by the viola, and each movement represents a stage in their "relationship." From the opening cello trill to the joyful conclusion, with frequent representations of Strosslova through the viola's beautiful voicing of the theme, the first movement illustrates their meeting. The second movement's theme portrays yearning, the third movement is a "vision of Kamila" with evocative duets between the violins imitated by the viola and cello, and the appearance of her "heartbeat." The final movement reveals Janacek's fear of his passion for Kamila and recognition his love is not requited through trills and tempo changes.

Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The National Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art. The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence. His compositions are praised for exploring “relationships among sound, space, and people…[as he breaks] open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.” In addition to his own musical and artistic endeavors, since 2004, Chacon has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital Award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

Journey of the Horizontal People (2016)

“The Journey of the Horizontal People is a future creation story telling of a group of people traveling from west to east, across the written page, contrary to the movement of the sun, but involuntarily and unconsciously allegiant to the trappings of time. With their bows, these wanderers sought out others like them, knowing that they could survive by finding these other clans who resided in the east, others who shared their linear cosmologies. It is told that throughout the journey, in their own passage of time, this group became the very people they were seeking.” - Raven Chacon

Founded in 2018 at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Erinys Quartet has performed throughout Europe, with concerts in Greece, Hungary, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and across the United States. Since 2021, the Erinys Quartet has been supported by Le Dimore del Quartetto, where they are also a part of the European Union-sponsored MERITA platform. The Erinys Quartet won the awarded 2023 Audience Prize at the Bad Tölz International String Quartet Competition, as well as the 2024 Esterházy Foundation Special Prize for best Haydn Quartet interpretation and the 2024 Bronze Medal Prize in the Fischoff Competition.  The ensemble, with roots in Estonia, Lithuania, Greece, the United States, and Finland, is named for the furies of Greek mythology, and is currently graduate quartet-in-residence at the Curtis Institute of Music. Learn more at https://erinysquartet.com/

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) 

Haydn's compositions developed against a period of great social change. The enlightenment brought about cultural shifts and revolutions that were felt politically in the French and American revolutions, and artistically in a move from Rococo ornamentation to the order found in Classical works. Known as the "father of the string quartet" Haydn composed 83 works for this ensemble type. String Quartet Op. 50, No. 5 is one of a six-work set dedicated to Frederick William II, King of Prussia, who was an excellent cellist.

String Quartet in F Major, Op. 50, No. 5 “The Dream” (1787)

Allegro moderato

Poco adagio

Tempo di Muetto:  Allegretto

Finale: Vivace

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) was leading voice of her gener­ation of composers, in her native Finland and worldwide. Her studies and research at IRCAM, the Parisian center for electroacoustic exper­i­men­tation, had a major influence on her music, and her charac­ter­is­ti­cally luxuriant and myste­rious textures were often created by combining live performance and electronics. After her 1986 breakthrough piece Lichtbogen for ensemble and electronics, Saariaho gradually expanded her musical expression to a great variety of genres, and her chamber pieces and choral music have become staples of instru­mental and vocal ensembles, respectively. She rose to inter­na­tional preem­inence with symphonic works and concerti performed by major orchestras around the world, as well as operas, and works for smaller ensembles; all of which bear the mark of her relentless attempt to blend the scien­tific, techno­log­ical, and rational with an approach grounded in poetic inspi­ration and resulting in deeply sensorial and asso­ciative expe­riences. Saariaho claimed major composing awards such as the Grawemeyer Award, the Nemmers Prize, the Sonning Prize and the Polar Music Prize and two of her recordings have received Grammy Awards. She was named ‘Greatest Living Composer’ in a survey of her peers conducted by the BBC Music Magazine in 2019.

Terra Memoria  for String Quartet (2016)

Terra Memoria is my second piece for string quartet, the first being Nymphea which was written in 1987… and my musical thinking has evolved much in that time, but my initial interest in string instruments has remained as vivid as ever. I love the richness and sensitivity of the string sound and, in spite of my spare contribution to the genre, I feel when writing for a string quartet that I'm entering into the intimate core of musical communication. The piece is dedicated "for those departed". Some thoughts about this: we continue remembering the people who are no longer with us; the material - their life - is "complete", nothing will be added to it. Those of us who are left behind are constantly reminded of our experiences together: our feelings continue to change about different aspects of their personality, certain memories keep on haunting us in our dreams. Even after many years, some of these memories change, some remain clear flashes which we can relive. These thoughts brought me to treat the musical material in a certain manner; some aspects of it go through several distinctive transformations, whereas some remain nearly unchanged, clearly recognizable. The title Terra Memoria refers to two words which are full of rich associations: to earth and memory. Here earth refers to my material, and memory to the way I'm working on it. – Kaija Saariaho