CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS

Performance Friday, April 8, 2016 | 7:30 PM

Dover Quartet

Weill Recital Hall
Members of the Dover Quartet are “already pulling away from their peers with their exceptional interpretative maturity, tonal refinement, and taut ensemble,” according to The Strad. “The young string quartet of the year” (The New Yorker) performs music by Beethoven, Berg, and Dvořák’s “American” Quartet, a work written shortly after his “New World” Symphony. Like the symphony, it reveals his fascination with the Native American music and African-American spirituals he heard during his stay in the US (1892–1895).

Part of Salon Encores.

Performers

  • Dover Quartet
    ·· Joel Link, Violin
    ·· Bryan Lee, Violin
    ·· Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, Viola
    ·· Camden Shaw, Cello

Program

  • DVOŘÁK String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, "American"
  • BERG String Quartet, Op. 3
  • BEETHOVEN String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1, "Razumovsky"

Event Duration

The printed program will last approximately two hours, including one 20-minute intermission.

Bios

  • Dover Quartet


    Joel Link, Violin
    Bryan Lee, Violin
    Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, Viola
    Camden Shaw, Cello

    The Dover Quartet became one of the most in-demand ensembles in the world after winning the grand prize and all three special prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition.

    The 2015-2016 season features more than 100 concerts, including the ensemble's debut at the Lucerne Festival, Yale University, and Lincoln Center's Great Performers series. The Dover Quartet will also become the faculty quartet-in-residence at Northwestern University, and will perform four concerts at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, two of which will feature new works written for the ensemble by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. The ensemble also takes on three tours of Europe, its debut tour of Israel, and performances in the US. The Dover Quartet performed a similarly rigorous schedule during the 2014-2015 season, with concerts at the Kennedy Center, New York's Schneider Concerts, and London's Wigmore Hall, as well as return appearances throughout the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Great Britain.

    During the 2015-2016 season and subsequent summer, the Dover Quartet will participate in weeklong residencies with Chamber Music Northwest, the Phoenix Chamber Music Festival, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and the Artosphere Festival.

    The Dover Quartet has won top prizes at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, and has taken part in festivals including Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Music Society's SummerFest, and Bravo! Vail. During the 2013-2014 season, the ensemble was named the Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence at the Caramoor Summer Music Festival. Members of the ensemble have appeared as soloists with many of the world's finest orchestras, including The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra.

    The Dover Quartet draws from the musical lineage of the Cleveland, Vermeer, and Guarneri string quartets. The ensemble studied at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, where it was in residence from 2011 to 2013, and the Curtis Institute of Music, where it became the first ensemble-in-residence during the 2013-2014 season. The ensemble has received extensive mentorship from Shmuel Ashkenasi, James Dunham, Norman Fischer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Silverstein, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, and Peter Wiley. The members of the Dover Quartet are dedicated to sharing their music with underserved communities and are active members of Music for Food, an initiative to help musicians fight hunger in their communities.

    More Info

At a Glance

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK  String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, “American”

In the mid-1890s, Dvořák spent parts of three years in the United States as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. During that happy period, he composed the “New World” Symphony, as well as a pair of chamber works that inevitably acquired the nickname “American”: the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, and the String Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 97. The former, written during an idyllic summer sojourn in Iowa, has long been one of the Bohemian composer’s most popular works.


ALBAN BERG  String Quartet, Op. 3

Composed in 1910 but not performed in public until 1923, Berg’s first quartet was a turning point in his career. Although Berg acknowledged how much he had learned from his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, he credited his wife as the primary inspiration for the Op. 3 String Quartet. In a letter Berg wrote to her after a performance of the work in Salzburg in 1923, he declared that it was she “to whom the quartet belongs and who brought it into being.”


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN  String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1, “Razumovsky”

The three quartets that Beethoven composed in 1806 for the Russian count Andrey Razumovsky marked a turning point both in his stylistic development and in the evolution of the string quartet, and exerted a seminal influence on composers like Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. Like its companions, the F-Major “Razumovsky” Quartet illustrates the boldly iconoclastic style of Beethoven’s so-called middle period.

Program Notes
Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with Chamber Music America's Cleveland Quartet Award.
This concert is made possible, in part, by the A. L. and Jennie L. Luria Foundation.
This performance is part of Quartets Plus.

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