Hailing from Israel, Korea-Canada, Saint Lucia, and the USA, the Dior String Quartet is the Bronze Medalist of the 2019 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, first prize winners of the 2019 Plowman Chamber Music Competition, and the current Graduate Quartet-in-Residence at Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music. Formed in the fall of 2018, the quartet has participated in a variety of programs including a fully sponsored residency to the Britten-Pears Young Artists Program in the UK, McGill International String Quartet Academy in Montreal, SLSQ Seminar at Stanford University, and held the Fellowship Quartet position at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival in Virginia. Dior has collaborated with Orion Weiss, Victor Yampolsky, and has performed in a joint concert with the Pacifica Quartet. They won the 2019 Beethoven-Haus Residency at IU and was accepted into the Evolution: Quartet Program at the Banff Music Centre. The quartet studies under the tutelage of Pacifica Quartet. The Dior Quartet are the finalists of the 2021 Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition and will be making their debut with the Schneider Concert Series in January 2021. They have been invited as faculty members for the Indiana University Chamber Music Workshop in Summer 2021.

Sunday, October 4, 2020, 2:00 p.m. (EDT)

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Angela Bae and Justin DeFilippis, violin
Benjamin Zannoni, viola; Russell Houston, cello

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Ludwig van Beethoven String Quartet No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1 (1801)

Jessie Montgomery "Strum" (2006: revised 2012)

Béla Bartók String Quartet No. 4, Sz. 91 (1929)

This program is presented in collaboration with the New England Conservatory

At last, Beethoven felt ready to enter the weighty string quartet medium and offer his first set of quartets for publication in 1801. Interestingly, the first quartet he wrote chronologically is known to us as Op. 18 No. 3, in D Major, and this F Major Quartet, written second, was placed at the beginning of the set. Whether or not this was an intentional choice, the piece presents rather well what the rest of this set and the later works would end up featuring: a radical evolution of the quartet medium he inherited from the reins of Haydn and Mozart. This was all a product of Beethoven’s painstaking and probing working process unsurpassed by any composer before or since.

The work begins with a fragment of a melody played in unison, followed by a mysterious silence. The fragment returns, more searchingly into another silence, only to be completed in a classical phrase structure. Immediately, there is another surprise as the phrase repeats as a forte outburst. The motive that comprises the opening phrase is a monorhythm which repeats in the movement literally hundreds of times, yet much like Beethoven’s future Fifth Symphony, its effect only enhances the energy and drama of the work. The first forte outburst serves as the precursor of many sudden dynamic contrasts, the motive acting as the thread stringing the music tightly together through all upheavals.

An early draft of this quartet which Beethoven sent to his trusted friend, violinist and theologian Karl Amenda, is a unique vantage point into Beethoven’s working process and coming of age. While the overall thematic structure remains the same as in the final version, the dizzying amount of detail-oriented changes the piece underwent is shocking to compare. The most important revelation from the earlier version is Beethoven’s clear handwritten indications that the pathos-laden and dramatic slow movement is meant to correspond to the events of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliette. With this discovery, one can only wonder if other abstract instrumental compositions of Beethoven, an ardent Shakespeare reader, were also meant to have programmatic ties. However, this is the only such example from his whole output that is explicitly stated, and Beethoven felt as though his music should speak for itself in the listener’s imagination. Even without knowing any programmatic connections, this movement would have been most striking for a listener of the era, especially with the melodramatic climaxes and painfully pronounced pauses.

Following this Adagio, the last two movements serve largely as comic relief, with an especially virtuosic violin passage in the Scherzo’s trio catapulting the energy to a feverish height. The mood returns to playfulness throughout the satisfying finale movement, culminating in a jolly bon voyage tune combined with the main theme at the close.

“Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition.

Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”

— Jessie Montgomery

The Fourth String Quartet of Béla Bartók is a landmark example of his compositional ethos, synonymous with all of the stylistic traits of his mature writing. It combines his sharp formal and technical mastery of pre-and post-twentieth century musical language and his devotion to folk music traditions of his native Hungary and beyond as one of the first modern ethnomusicologists. Above all else, his work reflects his prioritizing the myriad possible uses of symmetry in music. This quartet is groundbreaking in introducing various symmetries as the fabric of the main thematic material, the pitch centers of the five movements, and the function of each movement in the overall form of the piece. Bartok had a keen interest in arch form, congruous halves melded together around a central point, and the Fourth Quartet is the quintessential example of this form at all levels. All of these elements enhance a unique expressivity also apparent in the work’s scintillating energy and wide range of colors.

The first and the fifth movement pair as high energy movements presenting music as rhetoric — pitch motives going back and forth in discourse between voices, sometimes argumentatively.
They feature the same symmetrical motif throughout both movements, as well as an
Arabian-inspired tune heard gently in the first movement and roaringly in the last. Even within the intellectual discourse of the movements, a dance element is omnipresent. The second and fourth movements are hushed interludes which demonstrate music as a form of serious play, delicate yet full of inextinguishable energy. The second movement is a highly chromatic, eerie, and devilishly fast scherzo. The fourth is entirely plucked, with some of Bartók’s trademark snap-pizzicato and other extended techniques creating a unique sound world. At the center of the arch lies a serene and otherworldly slow movement that fits Bartók’s textural genre of “night music.” This third movement begins with the unfolding of a 6-note drone, featuring a delayed vibrato effect one can imagine as pulsating heat waves on a hot summer evening. The lengthy cello solo is said to emulate a Hungarian reed instrument called the Tárogató, and the subsequent solos of the other instruments vividly portray bird calls and even insects. The movement returns to tranquility at the end, with each instrument poetically dropping out in the reverse order they first entered.

Thank you to our audience, Jessie Montgomery, The New School, the Schneider Concert Series, and the New England Conservatory for allowing us to perform for you today. It is a pleasure to play these works and a very special occasion to perform “Strum” by the Mannes School of Music’s newest violin and composition faculty member, Jessie Montgomery.

— Notes by the Balourdet String Quartet, except where otherwise noted.

Simin Ganatra is first violinist of the Pacifica Quartet. She is also professor of violin and chair of the String Department at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She has won wide recognition for her performances throughout the United States and abroad. She has performed numerous times in such prestigious venues as Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebeouw in Amsterdam, and Carnegie's Zankel Hall. Collaborations include performances with YoYo Ma, Anthony McGill, Lynn Harrell, and Menahem Pressler among others. She is the recipient of several awards and prizes, including a Grammy for best chamber music performance, the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, the Cleveland Quartet Award, and top prizes at the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Coleman Chamber Music Competition, the Pasadena Instrumental Competition, and the Schubert Club Competition. Originally from Los Angeles, Ganatra studied with Idell Low, Robert Lipsett, and Roland and Almita Vamos. She is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory, where she was concertmaster of the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra and recipient of the Louis Kaufman Prize for outstanding performance in chamber music. She was previously professor at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. She has many recordings on the Cedille Records label, including the complete String Quartets of Felix Mendelssohn, Elliot Carter, and Dmitri Shostakovich. During the summer she serves on the faculty of the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Jessie Montgomery was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation and community development. Her parents – her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller – were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Jessie has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.

Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, ballet, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn… (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Passage (2019) a ballet commissioned by Dance Theatre of Harlem, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony and the American Music Festival.

The New York Philharmonic has selected Montgomery as one of the featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a cadenza for the Brahms Violin Concerto, to be premiered by Hilary Hahn; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and recent member of the Catalyst Quartet, she continues to maintain an active performance career as a violinist appearing regularly with her improvising duo Big dog little dog with bassist Eleonore Oppenheim.

Montgomery’s teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn, and Laura Kaminsky. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. Montgomery is on both the composition and violin faculty at Mannes.