Calder Quartet

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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…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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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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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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Director Oliver Stone, with whom Armstrong worked on the upcoming Snowden, as well as three past projects, including World Trade Center and the docu-series, The Untold History Of The United States, presented the award, along with ASCAP president Paul Williams. The Calder Quartet performed a selection of Armstrong’s music, while Lindsay Pearce sang “This Love,” written by Armstrong for Cruel Intentions. “Your music glows with a power that’s beyond words,” Stone said of Armstrong, but not before busting on how quiet the Scottish composer is.
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The Armstrong tribute, which included poignant interpretations of Armstrong’s music for “Gatsby” and “Love Actually” by the Calder Quartet, was preceded by an equally moving paean to James Horner, the Oscar-winning composer behind such films as “Titanic” and “Braveheart” who died last June.

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