Forty-three Years and Going Strong! The Portland String Quartet enters its 43rd season with two world premiers and a welcoming hand for a new generation of quartet players and teachers.
The PSQ's Portland concert season begins on October 30th, 2011, with the "discovery" and world premiere of a string quartet composed in 1857-58 in Portland, Maine, by distinguished native son John Knowles Paine. To highlight this historic performance, Maine State Historian Earle Shettleworth will present a talk at the concert entitled: "The Athens of the North: Art, Architecture & Music in Mid-Nineteenth Century Portland." The concert will conclude with two additional New England composers of note - Walter Piston and Charles Ives.
We think our audience will agree with The New York Times. Writing about a recording of Paine's music (not knowing of the Quartet) the critic said: "The Music of John Paine - No Apologies Are Needed. … What surprises the listener most is Paine's genuine melodic gift … There is something of Schumann, but more of Dvorak, and the influence is definitely wholesome."
The concert season continues on December 11th, 2011, with an in-depth exploration of music's most challenging compositional technique - the fugue. Colby College Musicologist, Steven Saunders, will join his friends and colleagues in the PSQ to discuss and demonstrate J.S. Bach's supreme effort in this genre - The Art of the Fugue. Disguising and then revealing his name - B-A-C-H (B flat, A, C and B natural) - in the culminating 14th fugue, this final and unfinished work continues to amaze and thrill audiences on both intellectual and aesthetic levels.
February 19th, 2012, will bring to our concert series The Boston Public Quartet, an exciting young professional ensemble headquartered in Boston, MA. This group is of particular interest to the PSQ because of their common connection to Venezuela's outstanding music/social program - El Sistema. When the "Orquesta Juvenil Simon Bolivar" was founded back in l975 by director Jose Antonio Abreu, the Portland String Quartet was the first professional quartet to perform for and work with, on multiple occasions, the initial generations of Venezuelan students in that program. Continuing their dedication to teaching, the PSQ is proud to encourage and reward young professionals who combine skills in performance and pedagogy. The BPQ will present a program of traditional and contemporary literature.
The April 22nd program by the PSQ will feature the world premier of Israeli composer Gil Shohat's Elysian Plains String Quartet (2011). This monumental work, written for the Portland String Quartet, attempts to describe the composer's vision of life's ultimate journey. Our audience will remember the stunning reaction experienced by the performance two years ago of Shohat's Saxophone Quintet with guest artist Kenneth Radnofsky. The PSQ finds his music challenging, distinctive, beautiful, wrenching and important. Mendelssohn's beautiful Capriccio will open the program.
