Ives Quartet - Press Release

Please Contact:
Tom Giuliano
www.ivesquartet.org

THE IVES STRING QUARTET
2002 Home Season Winter Series

Features
Guest cellist Elizabeth Anderson in Schubert Quintet
in C Major, D. 956
Also on the program: Beethoven Quartet in Bb Major, Opus 130

Jan. 19 (San Jose Museum of Art)
Jan. 20 (California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco)
Jan. 27 (Mills College, Oakland)

Palo Alto, CA – The Ives String Quartet opens its 2002 Home Season Winter Series with a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven, his Quartet in Bb Major, Opus 130 and Franz Schubert, the Quintet in C Major, D. 956 featuring guest cellist Elizabeth Anderson. Performances are on Saturday, Jan. 19, 2002, 2pm, the San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market Street, San Jose; Sunday, Jan. 20, 2002, 2pm, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Florence Gould Theater, Lincoln Park, San Francisco and Sunday, Jan.27, 4pm. Mills College Concert Hall, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland.

Beethoven’s Quartet in Bb Major, Opus 130 (1825), is a monumental work whose length and complexity is daunting. A few days before Beethoven’s death, the work’s original final movement, the Grosse Fuge, was republished as a separate work with its own opus number. Audiences’ perplexed reactions to the Grosse Fuge inspired Beethoven to compose a more congenial, lighter closing movement. The Ives Quartet will perform the quartet with this alternate Finale (Allegro).

Frank Schubert’s Quintet in C Major, D. 956 (1828), “one of the masterpieces in the entire field of chamber music (Denis Stevens)” lay silent for 25 years due to the shortsightedness of a Leipzig publisher. Why Schubert decided to double the cello instead of the more usual viola is unknown; he died before hearing the entire piece.

“It contains transcendent lyricism, the Schubertian welling up of melody and the warmth of sonorities” (Florence Nash).

The Ives Quartet has attracted international acclaim from New York to San Francisco, Taiwan to London. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, in addition to performing as quartet-in-residence for the Rocky Ridge Music Center and the Telluride Music Festivals, the ensemble has appeared at New York’s Alice Tully Hall, Princeton University, the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles, St. John’s Smith Square in London and at the Sedona Chamber Music Festival and Sonora Bach Festival.

The Ives Quartet has fashioned a sound highly praised for its unity, versalitility and supple beauty. Joining violinists Robin Sharp and Susan Freier, Scott Woolweaver, viola and Stephen Harrison, cello, is guest cellist Elizabeth Anderson. Ms. Anderson has performed with the IQ at their summer home, the Rocky Ridge Music Center.

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