…This Saturday, lovers of modern classical music get their own endurance event at the Met Cloisters, when the Calder Quartet offers a rare performance of Morton Feldman’s 1983 piece “String Quartet No. 2.” With a duration that can stretch beyond six hours, the 124-page, fully notated score is a puzzle, a brain teaser, a feat of strength and an endurance test—of the physical and mental limits of its players and its audience…
NEW YORK TIMES – Exploring a Cathartic Moment in a Lengthy String Quartet
A funny notion, selecting a single, favorite page from Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. After all, this 1983 opus of titanic duration and fearsome reputation can last anywhere from under four hours to over six, depending on repeats and tempo. Requiring unyielding concentration and unceasing precision to fulfill the composer’s demands, it pushes the bounds of what is physically possible…
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THE GUARDIAN – Calder Quartet/Komsi review – Eötvös Sirens’ test is navigated superbly
Wigmore Hall, London
Peter Eötvös’s new Sirens Cycle blends Kafka, Joyce and Homer in strikingly different sections. Piia Komsi met its challenges with operatic brilliance…
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CLASSICAL VOICE AMERICA – Destined For Met, Eerie Angel Bows At Salzburg Fest
…Adès was at the center of a chamber concert the following evening at the Mozarteum featuring the Calder Quartet. The composer joined them for his Piano Quintet, creating floating, impressionistic atmospheres that are juxtaposed with the strings in Ivesian fashion. His grotesque harmonies and melodies underscore the sensation of seeing the music through a prism, as the musicologist Richard Taruskin noted early on, evoking surrealism. The Calder players were so homogeneous in texture and rhythm that they at one point resembled a glass harmonica.
They were just as outstanding in the string quartet Arcadiana, which features a macabre tango, a heartbreaking allusion to Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and a final movement, “Lethe” (the river of forgetfulness in Hades), in which the melodies lose their way and droop into nothing. Adès’ music won powerful context alongside Kurtàg’s Moments Musicaux, with its intricacies and wide-ranging references, and Schubert’s String Quartet No.14 (“Death and the Maiden”), in which the composer grapples with death and his lost youth.
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BOSTON CLASSICAL REVIEW – Calder Quartet gives stellar advocacy to Hillborg work at Rockport
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CLEVELAND CLASSICAL – Calder Quartet at Transformer Station
The Calder Quartet’s concert sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Art on Thursday evening, March 31 was an extraordinary event both musically and in its setting…
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CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER – Calder Quartet concludes Transformer Station residency with intense Beethoven
The Calder Quartet concluded its two-year, four-concert residency at Transformer Station Thursday with a short but impressive program presenting two works requiring intense concentration on the parts of both performers and listeners…
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