Composer Conlon Nancarrow's rhythmic studies for player piano are mathematically intricate creations, yet they often provoke a smile - not only on account of their buoyant inventiveness, but because there's a sly sense of humor at work.Download PDF | Full Article
The Calder Quartet saved the day Nov. 4 by stepping in at last minute to play for the Mill Valley Chamber Music Society’s second concert of this season. Originally set to appear was the Prague-based Prazak Quartet which cancelled due to an ill violinist. The Calder Quartet had performed the previous night in Berkeley. In the East Bay concert substantial works were programmed, including Bartok’s 1934 Fifth Quartet, Adés' The Four Quarters and three Conlon Nancarrow pieces. With such a daunting program Saturday night, one would predict the Quartet to be exhausted on Sunday.Download PDF | Full Article
A Music on Main production. At Heritage Hall and the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre from Friday to Sunday (September 28 to 30). No remaining performancesI can’t imagine what the Modulus Festival would have to do to get a bad review—and whatever it might be, it didn’t happen this weekend.Download PDF | Full Article
The 2012 Carlsbad Music Festival will include several locals performing, including Carlsbad natives/residents Calder Quartet, Wu Man, Sara Watkins with Sean Watkins (of local bluegrass/Americana family band Nickel Creek) with MandoBasso, Sacra/Profana, the Mattson 2, and Matt McBane.Download PDF | Full Article
What's new in music is, by definition, one of the overriding concerns of David Pay's Music on Main enterprise - a cocky, quasi-alternative presentation company with an eclectic approach to artists and repertoire.Download PDF | Full Article
Live broadcast from Calder Quartet's performance at Queen's Hall on August 20th is streaming on BBC3 until August 27th.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m0nm5
AMERICA is awash with good string quartets. The trouble is, we seldom get to hear them over here. So full marks to the Edinburgh Festival for enticing the Calder Quartet, which, on yesterday’s evidence, sits well among the US top tier.Downoad PDF | Full Article
As Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis explained from the Sherwood Auditorium stage Friday, he was having a very good month.
His newest piece, “Perpetual Chaconne,” had been premiered at Chamber Music Northwest two weeks earlier. Now it was about to be played at the La Jolla Music Society SummerFest and was scheduled for another performance this week at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
But after clarinetist John Bruce Yeh and the Calder Quartet finished with Kernis’ 18-minute piece Friday, you had to believe that Kernis’ month got even better.
Watch or listen to the show here: kcrw.com/music/programs/mb/mb120626calder_quartet
ROCKPORT - A certain kind of music fan insists that things aren't as good as they were in some golden age, some decades ago. Past performers had more personality, gave the music more character, and were more interesting, so this thinking goes. It's an attitude that dovetails nicely - or perniciously - with classical music's general fixation on of its own past.It's nonsense, of course. I'm increasingly convinced we are living through our own golden age of performance, particularly when it comes to string quartets. There is an astonishing number of young quartets with high technique levels and fresh approaches to both familiar works and fresh concert programming.A case in point is the superb Calder Quartet, who played the first of two concerts at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival on Thursday.Download PDF | Full Article
Rockport — Subtle decisions go into the making of a great chamber music program. Especially an evening that features new music.Download PDF | Full Article
Last night four young guys in black suits, white shirts, and skinny black ties took the stage of the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport: Benjamin Jacobson (first violin), Andrew Bulbrook (second violin), Jonathan Moerschel (viola), and Eric Byers (cello) are the Calder Quartet. The concert it presented was no less fabulous for its wielding different axes from that earlier Fab Four. With established works by Mozart and Mendelssohn bracketing newer commissions by Adès and Norman (and an encore), the Calder Quartet gave spirited and energetic readings as part of its ongoing efforts to re-imagine a string quartet for the 21st century.Download PDF | Full Article
April 5. Classical music continues to reinvent itself, and these days that comes in the form of interesting ensembles like the Calder Quartet, performing Thursday, April 5 at the Lincoln Center in Fort Collins.
Collaboration, the odder the better, is the engine that drives the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall. You can think of Judd Greenstein, the composer who assembles its programs, as a mischievous matchmaker who dreams up blind dates that seem as likely to create sparks as to create harmony.ArtsBeatMr. Greenstein must have been feeling especially daring when he drew up the program for Tuesday evening. The first half offered separate performances by the Now Ensemble, a hybrid chamber group and jazz-rock band, and the Calder Quartet, which is known for a repertory that includes both standard string quartets and adventurous new works.Download PDF | Full Article
At last year’s Ecstatic Music Festival, Dan Deacon created a bit of a stir when, for 10 minutes, the audience listened to the sound of soda draining from microphoned two-liter bottles. Things got uncomfortable. Grievances were audibly uttered. Deacon likes to stretch things out, to see how far they’ll go, to make people a little uncomfortable. But his aim is true: He does it for fun, and he hopes you’ll see the humor and absurdity of his twisted ideas and find some joy in them.Download PDF | Full Article
The celebrated New York-born composer and electronic musician Dan Deacon returns to the Ecstatic Music Festival following last year’s sold-out collaboration with So Percussion. This time around, Deacon has prepared a series of new works for two chamber groups: NOW Ensemble, dubbed “a deft young group gaining attention” (New Yorker), and the “outstanding” (New York Times) Calder Quartet.Listen to the show here.
California's Calder Quartet comes to Seattle's Meany Hall with a program that includes a string quartet by Jacob ter Veldhuis, inspired by the song "All Along the Watchtower."Full Article
The Calder Quartet takes its exciting and innovative musical inspiration from contemporary artist Alexander Calder, known for his large-scale, abstract sculptures and mobiles.
In January, I saw an unforgettably strange concert at the small NYC theater Le Poisson Rouge. Andrew W.K.-- party-rock force of nature and living animated .gif of a David Lee Roth jump-kick-- shared the stage, or jostled maniacally for it, with the Calder Quartet.Full Article
A partnership between the Akron Art Museum and Tuesday Musical Association of Akron has produced the Fuze! Series, which opened its new season at the museum on Friday, February 17. A similar partnership between the featured performers — the Calder String Quartet and the Czech-Moravian vocalist and violinist Iva Bittová — results in the kind of synthesis between classically trained musicians and other forms of musical art and media that Fuze! is all about discovering and presenting in the attractive, 160-seat auditorium at the Museum. That being said, Calder + Bittová is difficult to describe. You really do have to be there to get the whole effect.Download PDF | Full Article