With all the anniversaries upon us – the Los Angeles Master Chorale celebrates its 50thwith a gala at Walt Disney Concert Hall Sunday and the Los Angeles Philharmonic follows that next week with the start of a monthlong celebration of the venue's 10thanniversary – it is too easy to forget about Carlsbad. The quaint seaside village in North San Diego County is best known for Legoland. It is also home to the quirky Museum of Making Music.

But 10 years ago, a young composer at USC, Matt McBane, quietly (well, quite loudly, at times) started a modest music festival in his hometown with friends, such as the Calder Quartet.Download PDF | Full Article

No music captures the time-crossing potential of the Mostly Mozart Festival quite like Thomas Adès’s “Arcadiana,” which the Calder Quartet played in a superb late-night concert at the Kaplan Penthouse on Saturday...Download PDF | Full Article

Bartok’s Fifth String Quartet presents as complete a picture of the composer as any of his mature works. It begins with a series of repeated notes that the string players hammer out in a stabbing, irregular rhythm. Most ensembles playing this piece come out all guns blazing, accentuating the forward-looking nature of Bartok’s language.When the Calder Quartet, one of America’s great young string quartets, played the Fifth on Thursday at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, they took a decidedly different approach...Download PDF | Full Article

...Two fabulous pieces – a mesmerising and beautifully sustained percussion quartet by Daníel Bjarnason and a string quartet by Joby Talbot, whose galloping melodic lines slipped out of the percussive writing as if by centrifugal force – held a sense of outrage at bay, but the screams will haunt me a while yet.Download PDF | Full Article

...performed with admirable gusto by the Calder Quartet...Download PDF | Full Article

...“Groundbreaking” might be a better description of California Masterworks, a two-day immersion in the music created on the West Coast in the late 20th century that completely redefined the American classical musical landscape.  In a break from longstanding European traditions, composers like Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, and John Adams drew on Asian and Latin American influences to create new sounds and approaches to composition that had worldwide impact...Download PDF | Full Article

...A cycle of Bartok’s six string quartets by the Calder Quartet in the Rogers Auditorium might at first glance seem a throwback to the old regime. But the works are presented in three concerts intended to show “Bartok’s debt to the human voice,” in Ms. Tomer’s words, variously including a work by the Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos and performances by David Longstreth, the founder of the rock band Dirty Projectors, and the innovative Czech vocalist, violinist and composer Iva Bittova...Download PDF | Full Article

..For the orchestra to collaborate with the Calder Quartet on a reprise is "pretty courageous," said Riley, composer of "In C," by phone from his home in Northern California. "I imagine it's going to be a big challenge. But I would imagine there'll be a lot of people eager to hear it."Indeed, in the Riley catalog, "The Sands" is pivotal. Not only was the work his largest piece for orchestra at the time. It also contains autobiographical references and marks the point at which the composer settled on a means of writing for larger ensembles...Download PDF | Full Article

It wasn't B.J. Thomas, exactly, but musical raindrops seemed to be falling in a white-walled rehearsal room next to Walt Disney Concert Hall, courtesy of Milo Talwani, one of the L.A. composers least likely to write melody, let alone ear candy, into a piece of music.At 16, he's one of four area high school students taking the royal road to composing careers, at least at the outset, via the Los Angeles Philharmonic.Talwani, a lanky epitome of precocious Bohemian-intellectual cool who's a junior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, had placed pizzicato plinking sounds that evoked the first spatterings of a cloudburst into a musical fragment from a work in progress. It was being given its first test run by the Calder Quartet, a string ensemble that over the past 15 years has gone from USC undergraduate beginnings to international acclaim.Download PDF | Full Article

The world of contemporary keyboard music has few champions as valiant and sensitive as the Los Angeles pianist Gloria Cheng, whose playing combines technical fervor with a wonderful mastery of color and tone. Her new release with the collaboration of the Calder Quartet, devoted to the music of Olivier Messiaen and Kaija Saariaho, offers a fine encapsulation of her artistry in both its ferocity and its tenderness. Messiaen takes up the first half of the disc with his early "Préludes," a set of limpid piano pieces in which you can hear the young composer shaping the legacy of Debussy to his own creative ends. The forms and timbres of the writing are right out of the Impressionist playbook, but the rhythms and harmonic palette are already those of Messiaen's later work. The Saariaho offerings begin with a pair of pallid, directionless piano works from 2005-06, but the disc takes off with "Je sens un deuxième coeur," a vivid and fantastically dramatic treatment for piano quintet of music from her opera "Adriana Mater." It's a virtuoso display of instrumental color and theatrical flair, and the performers give it a superb rendition.Download PDF | Full Article

I first reviewed American pianist Gloria Cheng in these pages more than a decade ago. The occasion was her second album, Piano Dance, an exhilaratingly eclectic collection of 20th century dances, running from Debussy's Golliwog's Cakewalk to tangos by Stravinsky and Samuel Barber...Download PDF | Full Article

Iva Bittová cuts a glamorous figure. Reclining on a sofa resplendent in a yellow dress she has knitted herself, she greets the Guardian with a throaty "Hello darling!" Her voice is one of the many extraordinary things about the Czech singer and violinist.Download PDF | Full Article

...the four players so accurately and appropriately immersed themselves in the Beethoven piece that if one had not heard the modern music that came before on the night’s program, one would have guessed that these impeccably talented men spend their time doing little else besides focusing on doing justice to the performance of classical music...Download PDF | Full Article

On their new CD, "The Edge of Light," the wildly adventurous West Coast keyboard virtuoso Gloria Cheng and the even wilder Calder Quartet help to contextualize Olivier Messiaen's titanic legacy by pairing a 1929 piano suite and a 1991 quintet with 21st-century pieces by Kaija Saariaho, Messiaen's heir apparent in the present day...Download PDF | Full Article

A third composer hovers, ghost-like, in pianist Cheng's beguiling recital with the Calder Quartet...Download PDF | Full Article

...Produced in LA by veteran helmsman Mitchell Froom and featuring a cast of stellar players, including sometime Attractions drummer Pete Thomas, pedal steel nabob Greg Leisz and LA string players the Calder Quartet, it’s an album whose ingenuous, often nakedly honest songwriting offers an emotional fist gloved in arrangements of seductive velvet...Download PDF | Full Article

...The Calder Quartet gave three superb public performances comprised of works by Lei Liang, four Festival Composition Fellows, Mendelssohn and Ravel. When they were not rehearsing or giving chamber music master classes to UCD undergraduate performers, they played two extensive reading sessions of new works by UCD Graduate Composers. It was breathtaking to witness the inclusive and inviting approach that this exceptional quartet exhibited during their week in Davis. Their supple and generous performance of Ravel’s String Quartet felt like a metaphor for the way they operate: They are eager, supportive, curious musicians who maintain the same passion for detail in everything they do. Theirs is an approach that proves that the distinctions between “old” and “new” is one that falls away when respect for the music and the listener comes first...Download PDF | Full Article

…the Calder Quartet played some formidable Mozart and Beethoven… -Alex RossDownload PDF

Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eotvos gives the U.S. premiere of 'Schiller: energische Schönheit' in a program that also includes work by Ligeti....The precise and to-the-point Calders, who have developed a relationship with Eötvös (they are working on a project for 2016 in Paris), brought it off brilliantly...Download PDF | Full Article