Beethoven String Quartet in G major, Op. 18 #2 (1801)
Shaw Punctum (2009) and Valencia (2012)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical music repertoire. Of the Op. 18 string quartets, this one is the most grounded in 18th-century musical tradition. In German-speaking countries, the graceful curve of the first violin’s opening phrase has earned the work the nickname of Komplimentier-Quartett, which might be translated as ‘quartet of bows and curtseys’. The nickname may have originated from one of Haydn’s last string quartets written about the same time (Op. 77, No. 1; 1799), which was also known as the Komplimentier-Quartett. Haydn was Beethoven’s teacher at the time, and there are similarities in style between the two quartets. They are also both in the key of G major.
Caroline Adelaide Shaw (born 1982) is an American composer, violinist, and singer. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for her a cappella piece Partita for 8 Voices and the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her Narrow Sea. She is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. Shaw has worked with a range of artists including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, and Yo Yo Ma.
“Punctum is essentially an exercise in nostalgia, inspired by Roland Barthes’ description of the “unexpected” in photographs and in particular by his extended description of the elusive “Winter Garden” photo in his 1980 book Camera Lucida.” “There is something exquisite about the construction of an ordinary orange. Hundreds of brilliantly colored, impossibly delicate vesicles of juice, ready to explode. It is a thing of nature so simple, yet so complex and extraordinary. I wrote Valencia, for a concert I was playing with some good friends in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. I decided to channel Glasser’s brave and intuitive approach to melody and texture, such that Valencia became an untethered embrace of the architecture of the common Valencia orange, through billowing harmonics and somewhat viscous chords and melodies. It is also a kind of celebration of awareness of the natural, unadorned food that is still available to us.”
November 11, 2023, 2:00 PM TO 3:30 PM
LOCATION
Coral Gables Museum
285 Aragon Avenue
Coral Gables, FL 33134
PURCHASE TICKET: https://www.artsticketing.com/sbce/beethoven-and-shaw/28655
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